In 1942, the only real clue to sixteen year-old James K. Baxter's future fame could be found in six Manuscript Books full of poems, and he did not show these to many people. As he wrote in a letter to his friend Noel Ginn, 'I was very loath to expose my verse to the private or public eye, as I had sensed early the morbid fear of poetic expression which so many have' (Baxter to Ginn, 12 Feb. 1943). By 1946, when his regular correspondence with Ginn concluded, Baxter had filled a further seven MS Books and was well into his eighth—MS Book XIV. When, in February 1947, MS Book XIV had been filled, the total number of Baxter's poems in final draft was 1025—only seventy-two of these appear in the .

Two decades on, in 1968, Baxter, now up to MS Book XXVIII, ceased keeping a systematic record of his drafts. Evidence suggests that after two years of prolific output in 1966-67 as the University of Otago’s Burns Fellow, writing ceased to be Baxter's priority. In some respects he had exhausted himself—looking back he called the Burns Fellowship 'a conditional mistake' that 'hadn't exactly done me in. But my asbestos suit had worn through in a few places' (‘’, 247). Even before becoming Burns Fellow he had, in 1963, begun examining his role as a writer, and his motivation for writing:

The years of the Burn's Fellowship seemed to Baxter a kind of death. Looking back on the time he remarked that there 'was a bit too much death inside me' and mused, 'I wonder how much of the death was my own and how much came from the fellowship’ (‘’, 246). He appears to have woken to the idea that it was no longer sufficient to go about 'the business of the poet'—as he had defined it in 1963—as if a poet's vocation was simply metaphorical. An inward sense of destitution was not enough; the business of the poet became the prescription for a lifestyle.

I do not find it a coincidence, therefore, that the year Baxter ceased keeping his notebooks was the year he dreamed of a life free of trappings in a commune at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River, 'where the people, both Maori and pakeha, would try to live without money or books, worship God and work on the land’ (McKay, 237). Yet even when Jerusalem had become a reality and Baxter was living as simple a life as possible, he could not stop writing: it was a habit that had been well fixed in him almost thirty years earlier. In 1944 he had written to Ginn: 'I have at last discovered that it is more meritorious for me to abstain from writing a poem than to write it' (25 Feb. 1944). At Jerusalem this unshakeable need to write became something of a conundrum. Baxter began making even more explicit associations between poetic activity and death: 'The man called James K. Baxter, who is like a dead body in the ground, swells up and gives off a stink of words’ (, 17) He was unable to reconcile poetry—which he supposed he wrote 'for money and kudos'—with poverty, which was the cornerstone of communal life: 'It is absurd to say I am really a poor man while I keep on putting words together. Words set in order are mental possessions’ (ibid).

Many of these 'mental possessions'—Baxter's twenty-eight MS Books, and a substantial amount of loose material—are now in the Hocken Library. According to Howard McNaughton the safe arrival of the notebooks at the Hocken was due to good luck rather than good stewardship:

The impression gained from this account—particularly if it is read in conjunction with John Weir's comments that 'Baxter's handwriting proved at times to be indecipherable’ (, 7) and that a number of Baxter's later poems may be lost because they 'were not systematically recorded’ (, xxv)—is that Baxter's work habits were as scruffy as his later appearance. For much of his life, however, such was not the case. During the period of his correspondence with Ginn his notebooks exhibit a meticulous attention to detail. In fairness to Weir, though, Baxter's handwriting did become more of a challenge as time progressed, as the (still comparatively legible) draft of ',' from MS Book XX, indicates.

It was only after the publication of (1944) that Baxter began relaxing his standards of draft presentation. These early notebooks were his private publications. It is evident from the care he took in their presentation, and the considerable labour he must have expended, that the first fourteen MS Books were not merely records of poems, they provided the young Baxter with tangible proof that he was indeed a poet. It is an argument supported by the fact that, with the publication of his first book, a marked decline in the attention Baxter lavished on his MS Books becomes immediately evident.

Baxter's first MS Book sets the standard for the thirteen that follow. As we see at Figure 2, MS Book I begins with an inscribed title page.

Weir begins his introduction to Baxter’s by quoting this, with the comment ‘When he was eleven years old James Keir Baxter wrote the following inscription with a rooster quill on the first page of a new notebook’. Weir’s account is problematic on two counts. Firstly, my research suggests that Baxter was close to fourteen when he began recording his poems in his MS Books (see below) and Weir himself argues in his Introduction to , that it ‘was probably in 1939, at the age of thirteen, that [Baxter] began to collect his early verse into the first of… twenty-eight Manuscript Books’ (p.5). Secondly, in MS Book I the lines ‘Born 29th June 1926 / Will die when he and Nature sees fit’ are written in pencil (unlike the three lines below it which are written in ink, and may have been written by a rooster quill). As late as 1943 Baxter was still making pencil annotations in his early notebooks (see Millar, p.72), and could therefore have been anywhere between thirteen and sixteen when the pencilled inscription was added.

Immediately following the title page is an index of poems, these indexes follow a continuous numbering sequence that runs unbroken from MS Book I to MS Book XIV. What probably began as an attempt to keep track of his cumulative output later proved useful to Baxter as a means of reference when, for example, a poem was a re-write of an earlier poem.

An example of this is the poem '': the version printed in (p. 11 and also CP, p. 26) is a revision of the early '' which is poem 320 in MS Book V (see Baxter's letter on pp. 134 for this version). The later, published, version appears as poem 767 in MS Book XIII, where it is simply titled '' (see p. 379).

Figure 3: Numbering sequence of Baxter's poems and number of poems per MS Book MS Book Contains Poems Numbered Total I 1-83 83 II 84-131 48 III 132-162

MS Book III also includes transcriptions of five poems written by Archie Baxter: ',' ',' ',' ',' and '' (MS Hocken 704/3, pp. 65-71).

31 IV 163-263 101 V 264-323 60 VI 324-387 64 VII 388-460 73 VIII 461-503 43 IX 504-569 66 X 570-651

MS Book X also includes transcriptions of a further three poems by Archie Baxter: ',' ',' and '… ' (MS Hocken 704/10, following poem 651 on p. 177).

82 XI 652-708 57 XII 709-765

MS Book XII also includes one further transcription of a poem by Archie Baxter: '… ' (MS Hocken 704/12 following poem 765 on p. 155).

57 XIII 766-855 90 XIV 856-1025 170 Total 1025

Next to the poem's sequential number in the index Baxter would enter its title and the number of the page in the MS Book upon which the poem begins. Baxter recalled that the 'poem-writing habit began when I was seven' (, 121),

There is a manuscript notebook in the Hocken archive that appears to predate the more formal '' (Hocken MS 704/1): numbered MS 975/14 and titled '' this notebook contains drafts of many of the early poems later transcribed into MS Book I.

Figure 4: Poems in MS Book I listed according to Baxter's age at time of composition Age at Time of Composition

The age shown here is the age when the composition of the poem was begun; from time to time Baxter would add to a poem, if he did he would also indicate his age at the time he made the addition.

Poem Number in MS Book I Number of Poems Composed Seven 51

Poem 51 is in fact five '.' Similarly, a poem numbered 414 in MS Book VII records four other ''—see Figure 5.

2/5 Eight Nil Nil Nine 51 1/5 Ten 51 2/5 Eleven 1-8, 12, 14

The second verse of Poem 8—''—was added when Baxter was 14; while in the five-stanza poem '' (poem 14) only the first stanza was written at the age of 11, with the remaining 4 being added by Baxter when he was 13.

10 Twelve 9-11, 13 4 Thirteen 15-35, 37-42 27 Fourteen 36, 43-50, 52-83

The age at which poem 57, '' was composed is not clear—it appears to be '14', possibly changed to '13.' Due to the uncertainty, I have attributed to it the same age ('14') as the poems around it.

41 Total 83

In the early MS Books the poems begin immediately following the index (the later books, from MS Book XV on, have no index): every poem begins on a new page; as a rule each poem is headed with the poem's sequential number, a one letter classification (written in pencil) and the poem's title (underlined in pencil); finally, beneath each poem Baxter has written his age at the time of composition (also in pencil). This draft of '', from MS Book II, is typical.

Not content with simply transcribing poems into MS Book I, Baxter initially set about keeping a journal (MS Hocken 971/21) in which he described each poem, and the conditions of its production, in some detail. In separate columns he entered the month of composition, the year of composition, the subject of the poem, the metre in which it was written, his assessment of the poem's standard, his age at the time of composition, and, finally, two to three lines of general observations concerning the poem. Consider, for example, poem eight in MS Book I.

Baxter made the corresponding journal entry:

However he must have realised the magnitude of the task he was setting himself and decided, quite quickly, that posterity would have to make do without the author's insights—he discontinued his journal having made entries for just twenty-four poems.

Despite the decision to discontinue his journal, Baxter still included a considerable amount of information (detailed above) with the poems in the early MS Books. This information is useful when, for example, it comes to determining the years during which the young Baxter was most active as a poet. Figure 6 gives a summary the poems written up to the age of twenty.

Figure 6: Early Poems, and age at time of composition. Age at Time of Beginning Composition Poems by sequential MS Book number Total Poems Seven 51 (2 fragments of 5) 2/5 Eight 414 (2 of 4 poems) 2/4 Nine 51 (1 frag.), 414 (1 of 4 poems) 1/5 & 1/4 Ten 51(2 frags.), 414 (1 of 4 poems) 2/5 & 1/4 Eleven 1-8, 12, 14 10 Twelve 9-11, 13, 94 5 Thirteen 15-35, 37-42, 57 28 Fourteen 36, 43-50, 52-56, 58-88 45 Fifteen 89-93, 95-366 277 Sixteen 367-413, 415-568 201 Seventeen 569-778 210 Eighteen 779-870 92 Nineteen 871-982 112 Twenty 983-1025 43 cont.

Poems written while Baxter was still twenty continue on in to MS Book XV, but as Baxter ceased entering his age beneath poems after MS Book XIV it is impossible to say with precision how many more poems were written before he turned twenty-one—although it may be less than 10 if the sixth poem '' or '' (Hocken MS 704/15, p. 7) is an accurate indication of the poem's date.

Total 1025

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Baxter's first fourteen MS Books is his classification system. Next to the title of every poem is a single letter 'S', 'L', 'U', 'D', 'N', or the Greek letter 'w' (note the 'L' in Figure 5). Baxter entered the key to his classification system in the back of MS Book I, as follows:

This key is repeated in the rear of 'Book II' with two modifications that hold through to MS Book XIV: 'N' becomes 'not included, (probably)' and the letter 'w' is dropped. Baxter gives no further information on the criteria by which each category is determined, but from his application of the codes it is possible to infer a relationship that deals with their suitability for publication, combined with his own subjective assessment of each poem's merit.

In addition to the regular coding system described above, Baxter would also make certain cryptic annotations in the index to an MS Book next to the titles of particular poems. These annotations are less easy to decipher although it is possible to make educated guesses about some—for example, poems initialed 'AH' probably indicate poems sent by Baxter to his Aunt Hettie (Hester Hurst-Seager) who lived in Australia. However the meaning of symbols like a heavy dot or a star can only be speculated on. There is less mystery surrounding the annotations 'beer' and 'spirits' next to certain poems in MS Book XIII. These poems were written in 1944-45 when Baxter was, by all accounts, drinking heavily: in a letter to Lawrence Baigent written around this time he gives an account of the production of one poem while stimulated by alcohol:

In addition to the sequential numbering system that runs through all fourteen MS Books, books I to XII also contain one further measure of his poetic output: in the rear of each of these MS Books Baxter has pencilled in a figure that is almost certainly his count of the total number of lines of verse in each book.

My own count of the lines in MS Books I to XII is not identical to Baxter's, but in all cases it is close enough to strongly support my belief that these numbers are indeed his line count. The variation may occur because I am counting using different criteria—for example, Baxter may have excluded from his count lines taken from earlier poems to be re-used in later ones.

Figure 7: Baxter's Line Count for MS Books I to XII MS Book Line Count I 1426 II 1474 III 759 IV 2122 V 1380 VI 1445 VII 1897 VIII 861 IX 1489 X 2087 XI 1391 XII 2177 Total 18,508

The care Baxter took with MS Books I to XIV can be taken as an indication of just how highly he valued his 'mental possessions', and how he treated them as private publications: these MS Books cover his juvenile, adolescent, and early adult phases of his development as a poet; they contain all of the poems he sent to his friend Noel Ginn; the poems from ; the unpublished collection ; and most of the poems from . The fact that the dramatic shift away from inscribed title pages, careful indexing, sequential numbering, a line count, recording of age at the time of composition, and classification of the poem's standard, occurs around 1944-45—the period in which was published—fully supports my belief that once Baxter had actually achieved publication he no longer needed MS Books to prove to himself that he was a poet.

Why did Sargeson make Jack Parker’s wife an avid reader of Hugh Walpole?

At first glance, the reason seems obvious enough. Walpole, the highly popular, sentimental middle-brow novelist of English middle-classdom, is just the sort of writer snobbish, pretentious English-born Mrs Parker would read. Simply another small, but carefully selected, detail in Sargeson’s rather bitchy presentation. After all, he could have allowed her to be a reader of E M Forster or Virginia Woolf; but that would have given her real pretensions to taste, sending the wrong message to the few readers who would have got the point of the literary reference.

So far as it goes, such a reading is perfectly useful and valid. But I suspect two further details affected Sargeson’s choice of Walpole. First, he was born in New Zealand; so these ‘English’ novels Mrs Parker was so addicted to were not even written by a real English writer; another nuance for the more literary reader to savour.

Secondly, Walpole was homosexual. Sargeson would have known this, I assume, either from his two-year stay in England in the late 1920s when he moved in gay circles or from gay contacts in London like John Lehmann, who had published his work in . That Mrs Parker’s favourite English middle-class writer should not only have been a quasi-Kiwi but a homosexual adds a further disguised twist to her portrayal and of course contributes to the homoerotic subtext of the story (the narrator Tom’s love for Jack). The inclusion of such an encoded detail acts as a covert corollary to Jack’s laconic teasing of his wife with the puzzle of why the blowfly would not fly inside the safe or the puzzle of why Jack dug the hole and then filled it in again.

Presumably the point, for Sargeson, was that virtually none of his local readers were going to get this particular subtlety. The Hugh Walpole clue did not even look like a clue; for any who noticed it at all, it would seem no more than a satirical flick at the pretentiousness of English women immigrants. So, apart from the (not inconsiderable) satisfaction of a bit of private game-playing, why include the detail? Was it really, I wonder, a gesture towards that select, highbrow, overseas readership which Sargeson secretly longed for while he plugged on with his self-appointed mission of producing fiction in which we ‘speak for ourselves’.

Sir,

There are currently two differing accounts of the authorship of a six-line squib on the young James K. Baxter. The squib in question is

According to W. H. Oliver in (1983) and, following him, , compiled by Jim Weir (1998), I am the author. According to Frank McKay in (1990) ‘it was said to have come from Glover’ (106). Gordon Ogilvie in (1999), repeats this attribution.

Since errors in biography go on repeating themselves, I feel the need to relieve Denis Glover’s memory of the doubtful honour and claim the verse as my own.

The circumstances of writing it were these: in 1948 I was editor of the Canterbury University College students’ paper and Jim Baxter was literary editor. Halfway through the year, however, pressure of studies caused me to retire and the editorship passed to Christine Clark. For the last issue of the year Christine organised a page of mutual self-congratulation with cartoons of Baxter, herself and me accompanied by some teasing verse. Ray Copeland, then a fellow M.A. student of English chose to adapt some of Chaucer’s lines (on his Clerk) to go beneath the sketch of me, and I wrote the lines about Baxter. I recall the bad rhyme of the second couplet worried me at the time.

I should add that Frank McKay misread the squib when he saw it as ‘pie in [Baxter’s] face’ or thought that the first line was suggested by Baxter’s first visit, in the company of his mother, to the Caxton Press. The spirit in which it was written was that of a good-natured taunt from one young man to a close friend, and the first line was suggested by the pride I heard in Millicent Baxter’s voice speaking of her son when two other students and I paid a call of homage to Archibald Baxter at Brighton in 1941. It wasn’t coined by Glover especially for Baxter. It was common among young men of my generation to speak of one another in jest as ‘Mrs Surname’s little First-name.’

I doubt if Baxter ever saw the lines. When the issue of appeared, he and Jacquie had left Christchurch for the North Island to marry.

Though Frank McKay did interview me at length for his biography, the question of the squib did not come up and there was no reason why it should. Frank, though he was terminally ill at the time, promised to correct the error, along with others I pointed out to him, the most important of which was the mis-naming of the Otago medical student Baxter had been so painfully in love with (Jane Aylward, whose parents I had known in Blackball in 1942, not ‘Aylmer’). When a second edition appeared, I checked that Jane’s name had been corrected, and didn’t worry that the squib had been overlooked.

But mistakes like this can develop a life of their own, and trivial and tedious though it is, it is my responsibility to put it right.

Two of these books were commissioned by the New Zealand Department of Social Welfare to mark the centennial anniversary of the introduction of old-age pensions in 1898. But of course all three studies are also part of the avalanche of historical literature on the development of social policy around the world that has been generated by the world-wide fiscal crisis of social policy and the New Right assault on the welfare state. All three are part of the attempt to come to terms with what has happened to the postwar vision of the welfare state. Taken together, and building on the work of Margaret Tennant, Francis Castles, Linda Bryder, and others, they paint a striking and conceptually coherent picture of the grand trajectory of change over social policy in the past century.

David Thomson's slim, focused study of provision for old age before the emergence of the welfare state sets the scene with admirable economy and clarity. In the opening pages of the book, Thomson accuses New Zealand historians of having too neatly organised their narratives of the nation's history around the pre-history of the welfare state; what could not be fitted into that pattern was 'ignored or dismissed as fading remnants of a passing, cruder, less generous society than our own.' His own book, in contrast, is a pre-history of the leaner, meaner New Zealand of the 1990s. Colonial New Zealand, he argues, was a kind of social laboratory for anti-welfare liberalism. The colonial state founded its early social policy on the ideal of self-reliance, and on an abhorrence of dependence on the public purse. Repeated revisions of the law on destitute persons extended the obligation to support the needy to an ever wider circle of relatives. To help those without family, the state encouraged private philanthropy, or subsidised local relief agencies; the state itself gave assistance to the needy only reluctantly, through hospitals and charitable aid boards; it recognised no right to assistance, and much of public aid was delivered in institutions designed to be a less attractive alternative to poorly paid employment.

The colonial state was anything but a night-watchman state, however; for it pursued remarkably activist policies designed to help citizens achieve self-sufficiency. Above all, it fostered landownership with a kind of crusading zeal, virtually giving enormous amounts of land to an astonishing number of people. Failing that, it often provided work for its citizens—in the civil service, but also in the form of ongoing infrastructure projects, or of outright relief-work. About ten percent of the labour force was on the public payroll. Pensions for civil servants, moreover, appear to have been quite generous—amounting to at least as much as all charitable aid. Finally, immigration controls were intended partly to maintain wage-levels.

The colonists were thus encouraged and obliged to rely on their own resources in avoiding old-age poverty; and in doing so they showed a marked preference for individualist rather than collective strategies. By far the most important strategy they adopted was the acquisition of property in land. The accumulation of private savings was probably the second most popular approach. Life-insurance, private pensions, and friendly societies came a distant third. Thomson suggests that private philanthropy, neighbours, and even family members were not particularly significant sources of income for the elderly.

Thomson explains this pattern essentially as a product of ideology: New Zealand was settled, he argues, during precisely that period when the liberal assault on 'traditional' forms of social assistance and solidarity was at its most intense in Britain. But the new colony was also an ideal setting in which to put liberal social theory into practice: the population was heavily skewed toward the young, able-bodied, and male; there were no existing institutions to be dismantled, as there were in Britain; and the colonial government and settlers were able to seize an enormous amount of land. Not surprisingly, the sudden abandonment of.the 'New Zealand experiment' in liberal social policy at the end of the nineteenth century appears here as a product of changing values, and of changing circumstances. The number of old people in the colony increased by a factor of eight between 1871 and 1901; the declining birth-rate encouraged policies aimed less at parsimony and more at maintaining numbers; the economic uncertainties of the 1870s and 1880s undermined liberal ideas.

is an elegant book. Thomson's prose is delightfully clear and economical, his use of statistics convincing and judicious. After setting the scene in an introductory narrative chapter, Thomson presents a systematic, focused, chapter-by-chapter examination of different forms of old-age provision. The whole has a gratifying clarity and coherence. Unfortunately, this admirable focus is purchased at the price of some omissions that many readers will no doubt find more than annoying. Thomson is very aware throughout of the masculine bias of the New Zealand 'experiment'; but the implications of this bias remain for the most part unexplored here. Perhaps even more important, the place of Maori in colonial society is virtually ignored. It hardly seems necessary to point out that both public policy and individual colonists' financial strategies were predicated on the transfer of vast amounts of land from Maori to pakeha owners, and that in this sense the colonial state can hardly be said to have fostered 'self reliance' among Maori. To be fair, Thomson makes it clear at the outset that his book will examine only the situation of pakeha working men. Maori, he remarks, 'had a quite separate history in these matters which will require a study of its own.' The obvious question is whether an approach that separates these two histories can give us a viable understanding of colonial social policy or of its social and economic context.

Margaret McClure’s picks up precisely where Thomson leaves off, both chronologically and conceptually. McClure’s is both a bigger and a narrower book. Where Thomson treats a broad range of policy and private behavior, McClure focuses almost exclusively on social security programmes administered by the Department of Social Welfare. McClure discusses these programmes in far greater depth and detail than Thomson can give his subject, however; and her study is enriched by her careful attention to race and gender. Indeed, this book has an empirical density and a conceptual complexity that makes it impossible to summarize briefly. It has a strong narrative structure, and follows the development of social security programmes through several epochal changes; but it also sustains discussion of a number of important themes across several chapters and periods, giving the whole a thematic and analytical unity. Finally, McClure consistently enriches her discussion with a wealth of telling examples, revealing anecdotes, and often quite striking quotations, effectively capturing some of the quality of the experiences of people who came into contact with social security programmes.

This is a rich agenda, and in places McClure struggles to maintain a balance between narrative and the pursuit of central analytical themes. Inevitably, moreover, given the scope of the author's task, some subjects are underdeveloped—the intellectual background and motivations of policy; the connection between developments in social security and in politics and in social policy more broadly; statistical analysis of the impact of programmes; international comparisons; the activities of other government departments. Nevertheless, for the most part McClure manages her material well, presenting a complex and yet surprisingly coherent story that neither beats the reader over the head with a theoretical framework nor loses its way in aimless recounting of developments.

'Community' is an important word for McClure, and the heroes of her book are clearly Michael Joseph Savage and other Labour leaders of the 1930s, who put the idea of universal benefits and the understanding that freedom from want is the precondition for all other freedoms at the heart of New Zealand's social security policy. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Social Security in 1972, which proposed ensuring the capacity of every citizen to 'belong and participate' in a shared culture and community, comes a close second. As she points out in her introduction, however, social security provisions have not only 'symbolised the country's dominant vision of community' but also 'hinted at important divisions within the nation'; and in fact, much of this book is a sorry tale of conflict, competition, discrimination, and exclusion. Like Thomson, McClure points out the recurring emphasis in government policy on self-reliance—from the crude denunciation of the fecklessness and inferior character of the poor expressed by the administrators of the Charitable Aid system in the 1880s and 1890s, to the complacent neglect or psychologising stigmatisation of the poor in the prosperous 1950s and 1960s, through to calls for the renewal of the work ethic, of the family, and of a sense of individual responsibility in the 1980s and 1990s. She makes it clear, too, that a decidedly masculine bias and the determination to maintain a traditional, male-head-of-household family structure has been central to this conception of 'self -reliance from the outset. Widows, deserted wives, and single mothers have faced fairly consistent discrimination in social security policy. (The introduction of the DPB in 1973 was a major departure from this tradition; but the immediate and massive backlash against that programme makes it clear that it is far from dead.) The ideal of self-reliance was also an important part of the justification for the quite striking tradition of discrimination against Maori, whose family structures and patterns of common ownership, legislators and particularly administrators argued, made them either less needy or simply less worthy of assistance. At least until the end of World War Il, Maori were consistently given significantly lower benefits than pakeha—where they were not excluded entirely (as were ‘Asiatics', until the 1930s). The competition for benefits between the young and the old, finally, becomes an increasingly central theme in this book. Indeed, the villains of the piece are clearly Robert Muldoon and the elderly. The generous superannuation scheme introduced by the new National government in 1976 constituted a 'seizure of wealth' by the elderly, and it was defended throughout the 1980s by a 'wary and powerful' bloc of older voters, stymying any rational social-policy response to the economic problems of the decade.

The broad retrenchment undertaken by New Zealand governments in the 1980s and 1990s appears in McClure's account almost to be an unavoidable consequence of the exacerbation of such divisions in the chilly fiscal climate of the 1970s. By the middle of the 1980s both women on the DPB and the elderly beneficiaries of National's superannuation scheme were increasingly resented by working people struggling to get by; and with unemployment high, the illegitimacy rate passing 20%, and the population aging, the budgetary walls were clearly closing in. McClure implies that the more inclusive and generous recommendations of a second Royal Commission in 1988 were simply unrealistic. In the final sentence of David Thomson suggests that 'there is much to be learned by considering carefully the last time the "new" ideas of the 1990s were dominant'; McClure's account of the 1980s and 1990s leaves one almost believing that the lesson is that sometimes fiscal discipline unavoidably takes priority over social inclusion.

At 365 pages, Bronwyn Dalley's is the longest of these books; and it is a veritable mine of information, presenting detailed and judicious discussions of an extraordinary range of programmes and policies implemented by the Child Welfare Division. Even more than McClure, Dalley makes effective use of quotations, cases, and anecdotes, and in some passages this is a gripping and moving book. At times, the thread of Dalley's narrative threatens to get lost in the thicket of detail; the reader of a book this long needs more clear interpretive signposts. Nevertheless, presents a coherent story. Indeed, if this book is "messier" than McClure's in its presentation of a sometimes overwhelming volume of empirical detail, it also presents a neater narrative. In its broad outlines the trajectory of child welfare policy seems to be simpler than of social security.

Dalley's account is framed by two waves of de-institutionalisation, in the periods 1916-1921 and 1989-1993. In between, there is a massive growth of institutional care: the number of children in institutions tripled between 1948 and 1972. In a sense, we are in familiar territory here: in McClure’s account, too, the 1950s saw a return to traditions and principles similar to those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the relative social and economic significance of social security programmes seems to have been fairly sensitive to economic change, however, before the late 1980s the pattern in child welfare appears to have been simpler: steady growth. The Child Welfare Division (in its various organisational incarnations) had 20 child welfare officers in the 1920s, 100 in the mid-'40s, 291 in 1971; there were some 2,000 children in contact with public programmes in 1900; 7,000 in 1925; 16,000 in 1971. There was an almost equally steady evolution toward a focus on prevention, rather than intervention; toward the 'rehabilitation' of the family as the ultimate aim of child welfare policy; and toward psychological explanations and therapies for the problems of children and families. Finally, the expansion of child welfare services seems to have been predicated partly on a growing willingness to rely on volunteers, private organisations, and families themselves. In the early part of this century the personnel of the Child Welfare Division looked on poor families and especially private organisations with ill-disguised suspicion; by the 1980s 'achieving a "mixed economy" of welfare, involving families, the community, and the state . . . , had finally become official policy.' In sum, public child welfare programmes became more pervasive, less coercive, more responsive to the needs of families and children, and more inclusive with respect to private initiative. This is a pattern that will be familiar to students of child welfare in other western countries.

And yet, the story of child welfare policy in New Zealand as told here is hardly a success story. Much as the retrenchment in social security in the 1980s and 1990s appears in McClure's book as a product of the fiscal problems created in the 1970s, the sudden transformation of child welfare programmes at the end of the 1980s appears in Dalley's as the product of a long-term crisis that can be traced back to the 1960s. Expanding case-loads were the product not of success but of 'social breakdown'; and in the 1970s and 1980s the child welfare system could not keep up with the skyrocketing number of cases. After 1982, for example, reports by social workers on young people brought before the juvenile courts were no longer mandatory; the Division had to open a rapidly growing number of 'family homes'; its staff increasingly felt powerless and overwhelmed; its institutions were increasingly unable to handle the 'more violent, difficult and severely traumatised residents' entering them.

Dalley characterises the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act 1989 as a remarkably progressive and effective piece of legislation, a model for other countries; and she makes a strong case for regarding the Act as the culmination of long-term developments. Social workers were now to 'play the role of assistant, facilitator or coordinator' and to avoid 'disruptions to families'; the Act abandoned the 'welfare approach' to juvenile delinquency as 'intrusive and coercive', prefering to make young people' accountable for their offending' and to replace juvenile court proceedings with family group conferences; it closed institutions and offered home help, parenting classes, and recreation programmes instead; resources were shifted to subsidising private groups, rather than funding public programmes. And yet, as David Thomson might point out, the ideas on which the new approach was founded echo the terms of the liberal world-view of the nineteenth century: it aimed to reduce costs by passing responsibility for maintaining social order back to the family, reduce state involvement in social relations, foster individuals' sense of their own responsibility for their fate, support charity rather than create entitlement. Equally important, the broader context Dalley describes makes the Act almost appear to be the product of exhaustion, rather than of a new faith in people and their families. In fact, the book closes on a note of ambivalence; Dalley seems to imply that the new, family-friendly approach might degenerate, under fiscal pressure, into an abrogation of public responsibility.

At the same time, Dalley appears to be uncertain whether nineteenth-century values can provide solutions to twenty-first century problems. The 'rediscovery' of child abuse in the 1980s and 1990s is a good example: there were 2,131 child abuse and neglect investigations in 1987/1988, and almost 11,000 in 1992. An obvious question is whether a society that puts a high value on children's rights and welfare actually can get out of the business of policing families. In this respect the concluding sections of echo those of McClure's ; for McClure, too, points out that as of 1993, the drop in the numbers of unemployed was being matched by a rise in the numbers on the DPB and on sickness and invalids' benefits, and that there had been 'few gains overall in reducing benefit costs.' In the concluding paragraph of , David Thomson suggests that social policy has been characterised by 'a long pattern of cyclical swings between greater individual and family responsibility and greater welfare action.' After reading McClure's and Dalley's account of the exhaustion of the welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s, one is almost inclined to take heart from this perspective. It might be better to drive in circles than to arrive at a dead end.

As the entry in rightly observes, the Christchurch daily newspaper played a significant role in fostering New Zealand literature from as early as the 1860s (when it published material by Samuel Butler), but more especially in the years following the First World War, and well into the 1930s and 1940s. However, one small correction needs to be made to that entry.

Although Ursula Bethell did publish a number of poems in , she was not recruited by M. C. Keane, as is stated on p. 451, and nor was her poem ‘’ published under his editorship, as the paragraph implies. Bethell’s connection with the paper began slightly later, when J. H. E. Schroder edited the literary page, and the paper was under the relatively short-lived editorship of Oliver Duff.

The relationship was initiated by Schroder’s very favourable — if rather belated — review of (18 July, 1931),

The correspondence between J. H. E. Schroder and Ursula Bethell is presently being edited by Charlotte Elder as an MA thesis. Her research has supplied the dates of Schroder’s review and of the publication of Bethell’s poems. Bethell’s letters are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington; Schroder’s are in the Macmillan Brown Library in Christchurch.

Schroder replied (somewhat tardily) in turn (4 September, 1931), ending his letter: ‘I wonder if I may, without impertinence, add that I should very much like to see some of your verses in ’. Bethell soon began sending poems to Schroder, and like Robin Hyde sometimes sought his advice about individual words and lines. The first of her poems in were ‘’, printed on 7 November, and ‘’ printed on the 21st of that month. That these were indeed Bethell’s first contributions to seems to be confirmed by her surprised response, communicated to Schroder in a letter of 19 December, at the receipt of a cheque for ”£1/11/6 as remuneration for the two poems: she wrote that she had ‘thought poetry in the “Press” was for honour and glory — but not… I find a very charming bit of pink printed matter, on which I meditate with surprise and satisfaction’.

‘’ did not appear for another year. The manuscript was enclosed in a letter to Schroder dated 17 November, 1932 and the poem was printed the following month. By that time, Duff had also left to become editor of the (to which Bethell also submitted poems for publication), and was then under the editorship of Pierce Freeth.

Jane Stafford, in Vol.2, No.1 (May 1999), makes the following observation on Ngaio Marsh’s early play, (p.30, note 6): ‘The name and address are written in ball-point pen, rather than the ink of Marsh’s dedication. My assumption is that this indicates that it was written later than 1922.’

There is no need to ‘assume’: it could not have been written before 1938, when Biro patented his design, and is unlikely to have been written until after the Second World War, when ball-point pens became generally available in New Zealand. (I judge from a notebook with dated entries that I acquired my first in 1949.) This is not a trivial point. It would be crucial to the dating of some manuscripts, and literary scholars should take note of it.

Some 92 years separate this new companion to New Zealand writing from the first poetry anthology, entitled and edited by W.F. Alexander and A.E. Currie, published in 1906. In the introduction to their anthology, termed by the editors an ‘invitation to a volume of minor poetry’, Alexander and Currie memorably characterized New Zealand as ‘a little island country… forgotten by the world because it has never come much into the world’s mind’. Moreover, they asserted, the reading public should not expect too much from the poets they gathered together: ‘It may be admitted at the outset that there is nothing very great to be disclosed herein… There is a time that may be looked for, when New Zealand will be assigned a place among the nations not only on accounts of its exports of wool and gold, or for richness and worth in horses and footballers, but also by reason of its contributors to art and science… That time has not yet arrived.’ The small country was still making its literature.

Apologetic in their hesitant introductions, Alexander and Currie could not yet conceive of a body of New Zealand writing, let alone a corpus of work that might ever have its own detailed and discursive Companion. Juxtaposing the two texts is no wish to call up a simple and sentimental gaze over the literary achievements in New Zealand this century. There is a real sense in which this sumptuous volume, following on quickly from the second edition of , marks a real milestone in the history of literature in New Zealand, for it achieves its primary aim—providing a wealth of information for the interested reader and the active researcher—in a substantial fashion. The two Oxford volumes together now constitute a serious source of reference that covers many problematic gaps that previously faced the worker on New Zealand writing.

In their introduction Robinson and Wattie note their desire to create a book which is ‘friendly as well as reliable, which makes established and unfamiliar facts readily accessible, which is quick and simple to use as well as alluring to browse at leisure.’ The Companion is all of those things. The major writers among the 680 discussed: Mansfield, Curnow, Sargeson, Hyde, Baxter, Frame, Grace, Hulme et al., all have comprehensive individual entries for their works. Overall, some 110 titles are discussed, and it is to the credit of both the individual contributors and the editors that the overlaps between the different entries don’t cause any problems. These entries are the heart of the book, but the thematic and historical material (Alexander and Currie might be pleased to know that both gold and sport are discussed here, but—alas—not horses or wool) give the volume a sometimes unexpected twist for the casual browser. There are also comprehensive entries on Maori and Pacific writing and culture, the latter in particular usefully expanding the whole concept of ‘New Zealand’. Robinson and Wattie choose to view ‘companion’ in the sense of companionship, and the lack of any striving for comprehensiveness aids the reading experience when it becomes clear that the major figures are all here.

There is nothing to do but dive in. I started with the entry on Ireland, which is an excellent piece of condensed writing by Richard Corballis (I actually found myself consulting the list of contributors fairly frequently), good on the differing religious backgrounds of immigrants and the strong vein of Irish-New Zealand writing that runs from Jessie Mackay, through Eileen Duggan and Roderick Finlayson, to Maurice Duggan and James K. Baxter (Curnow is dragged in on the way too, Corballis rightly picking up on the Yeatsian stance of the younger poet). All the writers of the 1930s, who were my next port of call, are dealt with well, and it is very useful to have a separate entry on a text like A.R.D Fairburn’s long 1938 poem ‘’. A lot of work has been done by the various contributors in tracking down the genesis of individual poems or volumes, and this will be invaluable to future researchers. Beforehand, it was often impossible to know where to start to look for basic biographical or documentary evidence. Now, that problem recedes. The sometimes complicated publishing history of Mansfield’s stories, for example, are here readily available and easy to access.

There are some examples of superb writing here. Ken Arvidson’s entry on E.H. McCormick is a treasure of comment and information, an essay in itself. Entries by MacDonald Jackson also display his skills in both conveying information and writing with flexibility and a sense of style. And there are the talking points and moments of fun as well. Postmodernism is in here, but not postcolonialism (Currie is in, but not Alexander). Geoffrey de Montalk, we are told, is ‘the only New Zealand writer to date to have laid claim to a European throne’. There are plenty of examples such as these to offset the reputation of New Zealand writing that Robinson and Wattie characterize in their introduction as one of ‘an unremitting dourness’. Yet I sense that it is the thoroughness of the material gathered in this Companion, the attention to detail and the quality of the writing that will prove to be the base of its legacy.

A decade ago New Zealand historiography—with the notable exception of Claudia Orange’s (1987)—could boast few texts devoted solely to the Treaty of Waitangi. In recent years, however, a new genre of criticism has arisen which is now an established part of Treaty discourse. , edited by Ken Coates and Paul McHugh, is a valuable and timely addition to this body of work. This book falls into three parts. The first is Coates’ essay, ‘’; the second is McHugh’s ‘’; while the third section comprises commentaries on the two essays by a varied group of critics including Mason Durie, David Caygill, Roger Maaka, Bill Mansfield, Apirana Mahuika, Bill Oliver, Gina Rudland, Margaret Wilson and Joe Williams. The two main essays were commissioned by the Ministry of Justice, and as Patricia Scarr explains in the Preface, ‘they do not focus on New Zealand’s situation, though they refer to it; the task we set was to analyse what was happening outside this country’ (9). Coates, a Canadian historian who is currently Dean of Arts at the University of New Brunswick (and who was professor of history at the University of Waikato at the time of writing), has researched and worked with various indigenous groups in the resolution of claims. McHugh, a respected New Zealand legal scholar now teaching at Cambridge, has published extensively in the field of aboriginal rights, with particular reference to North America and Australasia. While the two essays employ the language of the historian and the lawyer respectively, both Coates and McHugh support the resolution of historical grievances while pointing out the limitations of the current process. Coates argues that indigenous groups and governments have different (often conflicting) goals and are therefore ‘talking past each other’. Indigenous groups, he contends, wish to assert their rights, and at a very fundamental level are seeking basic ‘cultural survival’. Governments, on the other hand, while acknowledging past injustices, tend to want to settle these issues once and for all. McHugh, ever the lawyer, suggests that the claims settlement process inevitably ‘locks’ both partners into the politics of domination—one side wins while the other loses—which creates an addictive vertical battle for power, which he has described elsewhere.

P.G. McHugh, ‘’, , 31,1 (1997): 38-57.

The commentators largely agree with the critiques offered by Coates and McHugh. Mason Durie points out that the Treaty ‘was always about the future’ and that ‘planning a future is a task for both partners’. David Caygill observes that governments, whatever their ideological underpinnings, have recognised that it is crucial to deal with at least the major claims before we can aspire to a healthy ongoing relationship between Maori and pakeha. Gina Rudland criticises McHugh’s assumption that the Maori position is known or certain, while Roger Maaka warns the Crown against the influence of what he terms ‘the rising tide of anti-tribalism’. Bill Mansfield suggests that we do not have a choice about the ongoing relationship between Maori and the Crown: the issue is the quality of those relationships. Apirana Mahuika takes issue with McHugh’s assertion that tribal structures are an expression of Maori identity, rather than its source, arguing that such proposals are ‘a pathway to disorder and dispute’ because ‘whakapapa is the heart and core of all Maori institutions’. Bill Oliver agrees with Coates’ main concern and provides an interesting analysis of the ways in which pakeha support for the settlement process is becoming increasingly fragile, wryly observing how this unease is symbolised by ‘the apostle of tribal capitalism, Tipene O’Regan, and...the exemplar of atavistic tribalism, Tame Iti’. Margaret Wilson presents a case for inclusion of Maori aspirations within any new constitutional arrangements. Joe Williams seems to point out that for some time Maori leaders have been suggesting a shift to more ‘organic agreements’ which emphasise the ongoing nature of the Treaty relationship.

is presented in a useful style that gives the reader the impression of attending a seminar where the dialogue has been well thought out in advance. For all the criticism that is currently directed at the Treaty claims process—that it is too expensive, too slow, or simply unnecessary—it has at least got historians, lawyers and politicians talking (and listening) to each other. This book is evidence of such dialogue. However, the main thesis of this book is that there is a need for more talking, more listening, and more consideration of the issues that concern both Maori and pakeha in resolving our differences and living together.

Steven Webster’s is a collection of essays which addresses two main issues: the place of Maori culture in New Zealand and the scholarly use of the anthropological notion of ‘culture’. Webster argues that since the 1960s students of Maori culture—and some Maori—have focused on ‘traditional’ culture rather than everyday contemporary Maori culture. The ideological separation between the two is the central problem he addresses. is divided into three sections: ‘culture’, ‘history’ and ‘university’. In his opening chapter Webster considers modern Maori culture, arguing that the assumption that ‘Maori culture’ refers to a whole way of life is largely ideological, in that it obscures that other part of Maori culture which is all about struggle and survival. Chapter two examines Maori and the people of Rapanui (Easter Island) and the way in which they make sense of their own ‘fragmented’ cultures through the image of the other. The next three chapters are grouped under the general heading of ‘history’. Chapter three looks at the roots of Maoritanga in the political and economic climate of New Zealand during the 1920s and the anthropological ideas which were being developed at that time. In chapter four Webster considers the work of Ralph Piddington, the founder of modern social anthropology in New Zealand, arguing that despite Piddington’s many positive efforts, he nonetheless helped to create a notion of ‘culture’ as traditional whole ways of life which were considered outside their own history. Chapter five presents a critical review of the last thirty years of the academic discipline of ‘Maori Studies’. The final three chapters focus on Maori culture and its ‘patrons’ at the university of Auckland. Chapter six chronicles the development of Maori Studies at the University of Auckland since 1972. Chapter seven describes the creation of marae art and ‘the reproduction of Maori ethnicity’. The final chapter considers the postmodernisation of Maori culture, or as Webster describes ‘the appropriation of Maori culture as a whole way of life, to the disregard of its other side, by theoretical interests stemming from the French post-structuralist development of meanings-based cultural theory’ (255).

The title of this book is a deliberate play on Ruth Benedict’s 1930’s publication . Webster, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, claims that his method is ‘ethnographic’, which he defines as ‘the written description and analysis of another culture, understood through the anthropological method of participant observation’ (7). Webster, the self-defined ‘participant ethnographer’, makes it clear throughout that he is a white male American academic. This is important because so much of his argument is based on his own observations, within the context of the university. He is clearly opposed to what he considers to be an alliance between the university and the business interests, most notably the neo-liberal restructuring of the state. Webster’s contempt for market-driven philosophy is only rivalled by his suspicion of literary postmodernism, as expressed by certain members of the Department of English at the University of Auckland. The ‘Maori Renaissance’ of the title he sees as the ‘ethnic mobilisation’ which had started in the early 1970s. Some historians may well find this term highly problematic, given that Maori have, for the last 150 years at least, petitioned for land grievances and called for greater recognition of their culture.

Those readers who are already familiar with Webster’s work will find little that is new in this volume, as versions of five of the eight chapters have been previously published elsewhere. The main questions of this book are important but remained only partially answered: what is the relationship between the (so-called) Maori Renaissance to social impoverishment more generally in Maori society? And, whose definition of Maori culture is being promoted and in what context? While this book has its problems, it does nonetheless present a challenging thesis. However, this reviewer is left wondering just how, in publishing this book, Webster can distance himself from the ‘patrons’ of whom he is so critical?

For Hone Tuwhare’s biographer, Janet Hunt, these words—the opening words of his well-known poem ‘’ (1972)—must have reverberated as a powerful warning, reminding her in no uncertain terms that like his ‘Maori figure’, Hone did not wish to be put on a pedestal as a larger-than-life monument, but sought a representation that allowed him to keep his ‘guts’, that re-presented his very physical and ‘real’ presence.

A guideline though they might have offered her, these warning words also made her task rather difficult, for Tuwhare’s living and breathing ‘presence’ could not easily be re-presented. According to Hunt, Tuwhare, ‘like Maui, ... inhabits a shifting and multiple identity’ (7) that forever escapes the focusing lens of the biographer:

Given the difficulty of the task, Hunt has done a superb job. Instead of producing a conventional celebratory biography, she has written—or assembled—what she aptly calls an ‘auto/biography’. Hone Tuwhare is held together by Hunt’s biographical framework, but fleshed out by the voice of the poet in countless poems, interviews, letters and notes.

Like many Maori of his generation, Tuwhare grew up the hard way, surrounded by poverty and a Pakeha ideology of assimilation that forced Maori to renounce their own cultural identity. Motherless from the age of five, he lived with his father in ever-changing circumstances as the country slid into a depression. Schooling was irregular, but thanks to a keen interest in reading Tuwhare graduated from primary school as top of the class in English. However, as there was no money for further education, Tuwhare had to leave school and learn a trade, instead. He became a boilermaker—a profession that kept him in bread and butter for most of his life.

Though in his early years Tuwhare was surrounded by te reo Maori, he was soon discouraged from speaking the language, because his father Ben—like so many others at the time—‘believed that English was the language of the future for his son’ (28).

Tuwhare’s poetic beginnings similarly display an unquestioning acceptance of an assumed European superiority. In one of the most memorable anecdotes in the book, Tuwhare relates how the poet R.A.K. Mason, a fellow member of the Communist Party, inspired him to try a few verses himself:

Having freed himself from these constraints, Tuwhare set out to find and refine his own poetic voice. Hunt guides the reader through the major events, both real-life and literary, in the remarkable journey of this emerging Maori poet. From Hunt, the biographer, we learn about his trips overseas as a boilermaker, the break-up of his marriage, his son's schizophrenia, and finally, his countless trips overseas as a poet. And from Hunt, the scholar, we also learn about Tuwhare's poetry and are given a critical assessment of individual collections. Each of Tuwhare’s ten collections is given due attention, from his first collection, (1964),—reprinted a sensational eleven times—to his most recent one, (1997),—winner of the 1998 Montana Award for poetry. Thanks to both this attention to his publications and a number of in-depth, thematically grouped discussions of individual poems, Hone Tuwhare offers not just the usual biographical context for Tuwhare's work, but also serves as a splendid introduction to the poetry itself.

The book is beautifully produced (following Hunt’s own design). The choice of colours — black, white and a few touches of red — subtly underlines Tuwhare’s Maori identity. The wide margins left by the main text are utilised in two ways: firstly for the aforementioned thematic discussions of individual poems and secondly for the ‘auto’-part of this ‘auto/biography’: numerous reproductions of photos, poems, first drafts, notes and other important documents from Tuwhare’s life.

As a reader, I initially found these margins and their diversions from the 'main' narrative rather frustrating, because they kept interrupting the flow of my reading. However, I have since come to appreciate these interruptions as yet another of Hunt’s strategies to bring Hone’s own voice to the fore, and thereby recreate for the reader an experience of his life and personality. This sense that Hone’s life is being offered to us to experience is even more striking, when we take into consideration that the very process (of interrupting the main narrative) mimetically reproduces Hunt’s own experience of the poet, such as she described it in an interview with Iain Sharp:

How much easier it would have been for Hunt to gloss over all those ramblings and diversions and create a coherent, linear narrative celebrating the life of one of Aotearoa/New Zealand's favourite poets; how much easier in other words, to ‘cast him in bronze’ and put him up on a pedestal for us all to look at. Yet Hunt decided to pay tribute not only to Tuwhare's life and poetry, but also to his personality. The result is an auto/biography in which Tuwhare is indeed allowed to keep his ‘guts’. The book, as Hunt rightly points out, ‘is thus a platform for another Tuwhare performance’, allowing Hone what his ‘Maori figure cast in bronze’ was refused, namely to step down from the pedestal that elevates (and thus separates) him from what he most longs to be part of—life itself:

Assuming New Zealand literature is still being studied in 2060, how will scholars view the 1990s? Might this decade be seen as a formative era against which writers of the future must somehow test and define themselves?

Let's imagine that in the second half of the 21st century there is indeed an orthodox view of New Zealand writing in the 1990s; some neat, coherent story that academics annually narrate to successive generations of students. Then a new scholar comes along who, because of cultural and geographical distance, hasn't heard that tale; who reads outside the orthodox box, digs around, asks questions, even interviews survivors from the period.

This scholar tells a quite different story, arguing that the orthodox view doesn't really do the 1990s justice. There were many more writers contributing to the literary scene; a number of vigorous presses were vying for a market share. The understanding of the decade in 2060 does not emerge purely from the decade itself, but is largely a construct of influential critics writing in the early part of the 21st century—critics who were themselves stakeholders in the types of writing and critical discourse now accepted as orthodox. The critical ideas that are commonplace in this, the late 21st century, concludes this scholar, are, in important respects, the victors’ spoils left after a struggle for rhetorical control of the discourse.

I'll call a halt to this fancy before it gets the better of me (if it hasn't already). The point I am arriving at is that the imaginary achievements of my 21st century scholar in interrogating an orthodox view of the 1990s, have a parallel in Stuart Murray's actual interrogation of our late 20th century view of literary trends in the 1930s.

Given the range of events the 1930s calls to mind, it is hard for New Zealanders not to see the decade as one of the century's most significant. The great depression, the nation's approaching centenary, the impending war, the major move to the political left and resulting formation of the welfare state are just a few of the many occurrences that sent ripples into the future. Events of comparative magnitude were also affecting the literature of the time: the period saw the rise to prominence of Allen Curnow, the Caxton Press, Frank Sargeson, John Mulgan and Robin Hyde to name but a few leading literary influences. An emerging, confident, authentic voice proclaimed a new dawn of literary nationalism. Swept aside were the laments of deracinated colonisers, the prurient sentimentality of late-Victorian imitators, and the insipid gestures towards an indigenous English language literature of Georgian poetasters.

At least these days, that tends to be how the literary events of the 1930s are most frequently represented. It wasn't how Robin Hyde viewed things at the time. The writers and academics we now regard as the leaders in the development of New Zealand literary nationalism were to Hyde, in the terms of her 1938 essay '', a type of literary 'gang'. It was the members of this gang that played a significant role in ensuring Hyde's extended stay on the margin's of the decade's writing. In '', Hyde, with a little gang retaliation of her own, drolly characterises the group—R.A.K. Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn, Curnow, Denis Glover, Ian Milner and Sargeson—as 'student writers'. While acknowledging their energy, she doesn't accord them the status they have since enjoyed. Nor does she credit the 1930s with some conscious and coherent development of literary nationalism. Instead she situates any moves towards a self-conscious national literature within a wider context of global politics and a global depression.

Murray works to some extent along Hyde's lines, taking an approach that is impressive for its detail and range of reference. For literary nationalists to properly construct myths of national identity, he argues, the complex influence of socialist politics must necessarily be disregarded. The focus must be tight, the view narrow. Murray's solution is to enrich the nationalist mix with generous re-inclusion of elements of the northern hemisphere literature and socialist politics that so clearly influenced New Zealand writing of the period. He does this in eight chapters, the titles of which fasten on a number of the decade's key figures: D'Arcy Cresswell, Mason, Ursula Bethell, Eileen Duggan, Fairburn, Sargeson, Hyde, Mulgan and Curnow. Still others, like Charles Brasch, M.H. Holcroft and Denis Glover weave their way in and out as it serves Murray's argument.

Not surprisingly, the books most powerful and pervasive figure is Curnow. Murray's discussion of the way Curnow's views and writing conditioned the approaches of fellow critics and poets, does much to explain why some authors made it into the nationalist canon and others fell outside it. Murray also counters the impression of the decade as one dominated by powerful male voices though his sections on Bethell, Duggan and Hyde. The greatest strength of the study, however, is that it makes almost no attempt to place a writer anywhere other than in, what the evidence suggests to be, their rightful place. There are no attempts to elevate the undeserving; all are judged on their achievements. Hyde, in particular, is found to have been poorly treated and so is positioned more centrally in a decade that she dominated in terms of both productivity and inventiveness.

My major reservation with Murray's study is, as some others have also commented, with his chapter on Mulgan. Murray argues that Mulgan 'has been the product of the most laborious nationalist myth-making....Yet the author and text read as being so central to local literary concerns was in fact easily the most peripheral.' He asserts that two of the leading proponents of New Zealand Literary nationalism—James Bertram and Paul Day—fastened on Mulgan because they found in him 'the perfect figure to compound the achievement perceived to originate in the Sargeson gaze.' The theory is predicated in part on an implication that Day and Bertram, through their privileged control over Mulgan’s biography, were being in some respects duplicitous by placing his experience of the Queen Street riots in such a central position, and then firmly linking the events of the novel to the young Mulgan's life.

I can't fault Murray’s analysis of the European cultural milieu in the late 1930s, and I'm grateful for his section detailing Mulgan's active participation in the intellectual and political activities of the period at the same time that he was writing . Similarly, his discussion of Johnson's trek into the Kaimanawa Ranges, which he sees as a further example of a trend in the international writing of the 30s for images of 'frontiers and borders, and hence of countries and crossings' to serve as flexible symbols, is extremely valuable.

But I don't agree that such factors invalidate a nationalist response to the text. I remain unconvinced that Mulgan's global view of politics and his distance in time and space from the setting of the book would have blunted his understanding of the way the work was likely to be received. I find it equally difficult to accept that Bertram manufactured a view of Mulgan to accommodate a nationalist agenda. Bertram was himself very much an internationalist with a global, as well as a local, political sense. Few people were closer friends with Mulgan than Bertram, the two shared an experience of the riots and, if we are going to resurrect the beast from the bones of biography, then it is reasonable to suppose that Bertram, perhaps more than anyone, had a fair understanding of the effect of the depression on Mulgan.

At the most fundamental level, that of the text of itself, claims for the importance of these depression experiences for Mulgan seem to be validated. As Trixie Te Arama Menzies pointed out, Mulgan’s description of the Queen Street riots, the section that was for so long regarded as the realist heart of the novel, is perhaps the most poetic passage of prose in the book. Commenting on the climax of cathartic intensity followed by a fall, and carefully outlining ‘the subtle but sustained use of water imagery’ that structures the passage, Menzies identifies one of the few instances where the novel transcends mere reportage.

But even at the only real point at which I seriously disagree with Murray, I remain grateful for his insights and scholarship that should re-invigorate the debate surrounding this unusual man and his influential book.

Never a Soul at Home's strength derives from the expansiveness of Murray's view. Its value is in the onus it places on other scholars of New Zealand literature to revisit, and if necessary revise, their ideas about the formation of the literary nationalist canon.

Robin Hyde wrote during 1937, a prolific period for her, in which she completed , worked on , and began the autobiographical . When she went to China in early 1938 she may have taken a copy of Nadath with her, and a copy may have been left with her mother. After her death in London in August 1939, her papers were returned to New Zealand, and ended up in the care of Rosalie and Gloria Rawlinson. In 1947 Gloria Rawlinson prepared an edition of Hyde's poems, (Caxton Press, 1952), intending to follow this volume by a second, to include longer pieces, including . A typescript and introduction were submitted to Caxton, and later (late 1958 or early 1959), to Louis Johnson, then proprietor of the Capricorn Press, but the work never appeared. In 1951 Hyde's son Derek Challis took over literary executorship, and his papers were deposited in the Auckland University Library in 1961. There were three versions of —a manuscript, Hyde's typed copy with hand-written corrections, and a carbon copy of Rawlinson's typed somewhat modified transcription.

Michele Leggott's edition combines these, and also takes into account two draft fragments. The typescript that Rawlinson gave to Johnson, found by Leggott in his papers in the Turnbull as she was completing the editing process (surely an editor's worst nightmare), is referred to but not used, as it is substantially the same as the carbon copy version. But Rawlinson's introduction is included as an appendix. Leggott has made some reasonable editorial assumptions, chiefly concerning the break—possibly from lost or damaged pages—towards the end of Hyde's typed version. Rawlinson—incorrectly, Leggott feels—conflates two sections, where she no longer has Hyde's typescript as template, and ignores the evidence of the manuscript. Leggott has reconstructed what she feels is a preferable reading of these sections using the manuscript as base text. The manner in which the text is set out, with courier type indicating material sourced from the manuscript, and endnotes giving alternative readings from whatever version is not being used in the main text, is exemplary. We feel that we are reading a poem, restored to its textual integrity, rather than, as is in fact the case, encountering an intricate, complex and highly scholarly piece of reconstruction.

Leggott is not as successful in the contextualisation she gives to . Her introduction is lengthy and detailed. While there is a good deal of interesting autobiographical material, and lengthy reference to other Hyde poems, there is little attempt to explain what the work is: or its relationship to the literary tradition. We are invited to view it as something beyond such influences. Yet influences there are, interesting ones: the , of course—Hyde described her work as like the Scriptures 'only of course more elevated'. But any nineteenth- or twentieth-century author who configures their work in terms of scriptural cadences is surely working out of Blake, '', '', or ''. Shelley seems to me a strong influence, in the politically inflected prose works, but especially in his long poem ‘', whose vaguely delineated persona and dreamlike quasi-metaphorical wanderings are very close to the tone and style of . Both Shelley and Blake would have commended themselves to Hyde as part of that counter-canon of British radical literature, which, as Stuart Murray has pointed out (, 1998), was an important influence in left-wing circles here. Whitman is another obvious influence, and Pound and Eliot seem insistently present. , with its complex form involving discrete sections which can nevertheless be read as parts of a whole, its shifts in tone and narrative position, its layerings of apocalyptic, political, personal and spiritual fragmentation—all these seem obviously part of 's ancestry. The Indian connection, seen most insistently in the section entitled '', suggests not just an awareness of 1930s political issues, but also the connection of the work to that nexus of eastern spiritualism and western occultism current in late nineteenth and early twentieth century poetry. Poets such as Yeats are an obvious link here. Leggott refers in the introduction in passing to Kahlil Gibran's (1923) and briefly in footnotes to Krishnamurti and Tagore. These connections seem to me very suggestive, and worth following up. Tagore's 1914 novel was called , a possible parallel to the title of Hyde's autobiographical work, .

Several sections of have a strong New Zealand and Maori referent, yet Leggott seems to resist seeing the poem as part of the literary nationalism of the thirties. I feel this needs to be argued. Fairburn's '' is not perhaps as unlike as Leggott suggests. It is just that seems less modern and modernist, more reminiscent, perhaps, of the Maoriland writers of the turn of the century, with their construction of the local in a synthesis of Maori myth, Victorian Romanticism and eastern-influenced occultism. Leggott's discussion of Hyde's use of the figure of Io, a conflation of Maori and classical sources, is interesting, but we should note that this was not a new association. Jessie Mackay's poem '' (, ed. Alexander and Currie, 1906,144) talks of 'Io, the Nameless, the Father, /To whom the eyes pray/ But whom the tongue names not.' Hyde may have talked disparagingly of Maoriland's ornamentational use of Maori motifs, but she read their work and may have been more sympathetic to their purpose than previously allowed.

Does Leggott exclude these authors—or much discussion of influence beyond the obvious—because they are not the kind of context she wishes to see in? Or is it because influence itself conflicts with her view of Hyde's genius as self-generating? The critical reading of the poem displayed in the introduction seems to view Hyde's work as a seamless unity, any part of which can illuminate any other part. This leads to some odd assumptions, in particular, a suggestion in the introduction that, in the place where there is a break in Hyde's typescript, we can substitute verses cut from an entirely different poem, justifying this with the principle 'Let one textual disappearance speak for another.' This is not the technique Leggott has followed in her scrupulously orthodox editing process, so what are we to make of it? Is it a suggestion that we modify our reading practices, that we imaginatively create our own text? In which case, why do we need the authority of hers?

An uneasy fusion of poetic practice and scholarly criticism seems widespread in this introduction, leading to a muddy and often misleading argument. For example, what does Leggott mean when she describes 's 'formal oddity, poem [sic] doing prose work, resolutely unmoderm in its address to the modem condition' but then says it is 'odd, moving, lyrical, ahead (out of joint with) its time'. Can it be both ahead and unmoderm? What does it mean to describe the work as 'flickering impersonation'. Of what? Why flickering? Can one say that the poem both 'belongs to and enlarges' Hyde's other poetry and that she 'worked deep moral convictions in each but to different ends'? Do sentences like 'Nadath, the false prophet anagrammatically at hand, Hebraically (nadach) expelled, slipped or moved away, had spoken truth and the mark of it endured in dust' mean anything? What about the sentence, 'The poem is delirious; it sets out with no undertaking to be truthful but may of course speak truth in delirium, a late-come wisdom text struggling with ideas about wisdom'? Does this contain any critical judgement or is it literary mysticism?

There does seem to me to be an assumption contained in these passages that has real critical force and is at the same time highly arguable. Leggott would like to read as an unstable text, not just historically—in the sense that Hyde may not have finished it and certainly did not prepare it for publication—but in essence. Hyde's typescript contains problems—the first 16 pages are numbered continuously, but the remaining pages are numbered within the sections. Thus after page 16 there is no assurance that the order of the sections is fixed or correct. But can this be reasonably interpreted to mean, as Leggott argues, that Hyde 'gave up on linear decorum and gave in to the lateral reach of ', that 'she became fascinated by the field of its discontinuous narrative' and that 'there are two s and there is in each case one place to start reading but very soon there is the pleasure (or anxiety) of choosing a path through the sections and responding to that version of narrative events'? (Why two? Doesn't this position open the possibility of multiple reading, even infinite readings?) This point is reiterated as the introduction concludes: 'A god, a woman and a poem may have two titles, two versions, and two fates; one visible, another obscure. There are two s, one printed here not without crucial assistance from the other.' Leggott then goes on to suggest that the millennium is an auspicious time for to appear, to describe the auguries that Hitler witnessed at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and concludes 'But now the other prophesying woman will be heard, and the words will be spoken for a memorial of her. There are always two versions'.

In his 1969 essay, '' (, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2), Don McKenzie quotes Karl Popper quoting a nineteenth century scientist: 'A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination, but does not advance our knowledge.' There are two versions of this edition of Robin Hyde's . One is an exemplary work of scholarly detection, preparation and presentation. The other is a work of the imagination.

This is an important book that tells the story of the origins and history of New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Between the time of its establishment in 1926 and its dismantling in 1992 the DSIR had grown to become the world’s largest state-owned scientific research body. Among its major themes, the book focuses on ‘the vital impact of grasslands research, DSIR’s involvement in the development of radar in the second World War, its important contributions to the theory of plate tectonics, the origins and establishment of New Zealand steel, the political context of atomic energy, and earthquake resistant construction.’ As much as anything, this is a record of ingenious individuals making major achievements in a climate of scarce resources. In 1992, the National government created ten Crown Research Institutes out of the original DSIR: the jury is still out on whether they are capable of delivering similar results.

New Zealand’s lexicographer-extraordinaire, Harry Orsman, follows up his celebrated with an authoritative and amusing look at the colloquial side of the language. Dipping into the great reservoir of New Zealand English for examples of ‘the distinctive informal language used by New Zealanders since about 1940’ Orsman provides compelling evidence that in matters of non-standard speech New Zealand owes a lot to the Big Frisbee [Australia]. This is not to suggest that there is a problem with us having traded in words well before agreeing to CER. In an introduction that effortlessly combines scholarship and irreverence, Orsman notes that about ‘95 per cent of our vocabulary, slang and all, is shared with other varieties of English; otherwise we would find it difficult to communicate even with Australians, let alone pay our respects to and receive an intelligible reply from our own dear Queen.’

The twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the writing fellowship at Victoria University coincides with the University’s centenary, and that happy conjunction has enabled the University Press to bring out this celebratory volume which includes a contribution from each of the fellows. The contributions themselves are as diverse as one might expect—both in matter and in manner—from such a varied group of writers, but they all take some aspect of Wellington (whether international port, or capital city, or university centre, or site of student protest) as a starting place for their work. Poetry, fiction and drama combine with personal memories of living in Wellington to create an unusual celebration of a fellowship which, as noted in the Foreword, has been remarkably productive and remarkably successful. The book is handsomely designed and complemented by photographic portraits by Robert Cross.