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Dr Brian Opie
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
John Edgar’s sculpture exhibition, ballast: bringing the stones home, at the National Museum of Scotland, was an event in the 2009 Scots Abroad programme celebrating and exploring the world-wide dispersal of Scottish culture in the context of the post-imperial re-assertion of the Scottish nation within the United Kingdom. He took a fact – the movement of stone from its indigenous location to other parts of the world as ships’ ballast – as a metaphor for the dislocation and intermixing of peoples and cultures in the period of British imperialism, specifically between Scotland and New Zealand.
Edgar’s work in stone is an ongoing inquiry into the processes of cultural transference exemplified by the transformation of the land in colonised territories and represented by his transformation of stone into signs comprising a discourse on the effects of colonisation.
ballast enlarged a theme in previous exhibitions to do with the complex personal and social process of nation-formation, a process succinctly located in the symbolism of the national flag; its incision into the stone represents the imposition of culture and empire on to nature, and imperial settler cultures on to a colonised indigenous culture. In the case of New Zealand, the translation of the British nation to the South Pacific is immediately identified in the juxtaposition on New Zealand’s flag of the Union Jack with the Southern Cross, one component of which is the Scottish saltire (Flagstone and Saltire). It is also, of course, worth noting that the Union Jack is no longer just itself, but it is modified by its new location under the Southern Cross just as settler nations and cultures are modified by their interaction with each other, with Maori culture, and with the distinctive qualities of the new land.
The exhibition’s coordinates were generated by the concepts of journeying and the grid mapping of space: the X coordinate: The catalogue of the exhibition can be found at http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast_texts.html.Flagstone and Saltire (the crossing and weaving of pathways, and direction-finding; the Y coordinate: Compass (the way through); the grid: Sett (the designed landscape); and the grid point: Landmark and Compass (the trig-station, getting one’s bearings)
The exhibition invited personal readings. Its symbol stones do not specify the stories which they stand for, but instead invite any visitor (or reader of the catalogue) to construct an account of the cultural ballast which, in crucial ways, constitutes personal identity. We know ourselves as members of a nation with a distinctive cultural history but always permeated by cross-border flows of culture, including flows outward to other lands through personal journeys and the accompanying books, images, music, and so on which both remain and change in the new setting even though those who brought them are no longer there.
Edgar wrote in his proposal for the exhibition that ‘This exhibition is for those Scots who ventured …’ I have over the past few years been exploring the poetry of one of the first Scottish settlers to New Zealand, William Golder (1810-1876), who arrived in Wellington on the They can be found at: http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/index.html ‘An Epitaph. To the memory of W. Paterson and John Barrie, who fell martyrs for the cause of Christ in separate places but are now lying in one grave in Strathaven churchyard. –Was written on the spot 9th July 1832’, Bengal Merchant in 1840. In addition to the hard pioneering work of bush clearance he published 4 volumes of poetryRecreations for Solitary Hours, consisting of Poems, Songs and Tales, with Notes (Glasgow: George Gallie; Edinburgh: W. Oliphant & Son; London: Simpkins, Marshall & Co; Dublin: J.Robertson; 1838).
My own crossings between Scotland and New Zealand, like Golder’s, are an instance of the colonial history on which this exhibition reflects. I came to Edinburgh in the late 1960s to study for my doctorate, and carried out this work on the relations between puritanism and early modern science under the monitory presence of the statue of John Knox in the courtyard of New College. By the time I returned in 2002, the focus of my research had shifted to Golder, although issues in the relations between science and religion have remained prominent. A striking feature of Golder’s poetry and the knowledge which informs it is that it is drawn almost exclusively from Scottish sources, and I have become increasingly aware that my research is itself a further stage in the process of cultural transmission and modification which Golder for one set in motion when he was forced to emigrate. As with all cultural exchange, the process is not linear, but weaves times and texts together in strange and unexpected ways. Golder could not anticipate me as a reader (although he addressed the future generations who would have forgotten those who came before them), just as I was quite unaware for a large part of my life that Golder lay at my roots as a Pakeha New Zealander “Pakeha” is the term generally adopted by the indigenous people of New Zealand to refer to European settlers. While not universally accepted, it is now commonly used by the descendants of the settlers to mean “New Zealander of English or European origin”.
In relation to ballast, there are four distinctive moments of personal cultural encounter in Scotland which I want to bring to bear upon it. The first is my ‘discovery’ of the Picts during my period of doctoral study; the second is Calum Colvin’s exhibition, Ossian. Fragments of Ancient Poetry, which by chance was on at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery when I arrived back in 2002; the third is the work of the poet, Rev Robert Pollok; and the fourth is the reading I have been able to do into the work of Hugh Miller, the stonemason geologist contemporary of Golder’s, on my latest visit in 2009.
In order to bring these moments together, I will refer to a letter from Lunaticus to the Editor which was published in Jones argues convincingly that this letter if one of a group of essays on the significance of technology written by Samuel Butler and published in Christchurch between 1863 and 1865. See Joseph Jones, The Press in Christchurch in 1863The Cradle of Erewhon: Samuel Butler in New Zealand. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959, 107-108, and Appendix C.
Lunaticus’s first premise is that: “the human mind is only developed in one way, i.e., by being placed under new circumstances, and it can only be placed under new circumstances by the body, and in one or another of these three ways, or by a compound of one or more, or all of them. These ways are, travel, conversation, or reading’ (197). However, all of these assume that minds can communicate. For Lunaticus, the history of communication begins ‘on a great white day [when] some naked savage …conceived the idea of making an intentional track for himself with a premeditated purpose of attracting the attention of others of his kind.’ The significance of this moment is that ‘no other animal but man has hit upon the intentional tacking of its mind onto matter, and without this no intellectual development and consequently no material development, is possible.’ The steps in this development involve: ‘making a mark’; then ‘render[ing] it permanent – for which purpose a heap of stones would soon suggest itself’; then an increase in accuracy through ‘hieroglyphics … possibly first effected roughly by an arrangement of stones, a stone for each man and so on’; then the development of ‘letters which were not more accurate but more decipherable’; and then paper and parchment, or the inscription rendered portable’ Jones, 98-99.Lectures on Rhetoric and Criticism, and on subjects introductory to the critical study of the Scriptures Edinburgh: W. Oliphant and Son, 1838, p.71.
Lunaticus’s account is also a summary history both of communication technology and civilisation. The National Museum of Scotland contains its own representative account of this history, in its rich collections of carved stones recording the cultures of Scotland, and the early writing systems – ogham, runic, Roman – which communicate the meaning and purpose of the monuments to those who can read the stone writing. Culturally and historically, it provided a resonant setting in which to view and read George Henderson and Elizabeth Henderson, "[Illus.1 a symbol stone: http://www.nms.ac.uk/highlights/objects_in_focus/hilton_of_cadboll_stone.aspx]ballast. Of all these records of past life, the Pictish monuments were most exciting to me because, as the bearer of a literate culture established in New Zealand by settlers like Golder, but brought up in ignorance of Maori culture and its traditions of non-alphabetic representation (especially in weaving and carving, but also in rock drawing), I had not previously encountered a culture which had left proud traces of its existence and mode of life in artefacts (in this instance, collections of stones inscribed with iconic and symbolic images), but for whom literacy did not seem to be important and whose graphic inscriptions lacked an interpretive key in a verbal commentary.The Art of the Picts. Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004) write that “Nobody exposed to the Pictish symbols is not haunted day and night by the problem of their meaning’ (169).
The settlement of New Zealand took place just as geology and astronomy were being recognised as the sciences which could provide a representation of the actual vastness of space and time and which were repositioning inherited knowledge of the universe as a result. Golder, along with other Scotsmen in Wellington, like William Lyon the publisher and John Coutts Crawford the surveyor, were caught up in the early exploration and description of the geological character and history of New Zealand, and the contribution of that work to the expansion of general geological knowledge. For Golder, writing the history of New Zealand is a matter of reading the landscape as a collection of signs of its origin and its transformations over time, but through travel by connecting the knowledge formulated by Scots like James Hutton, Thomas Playfair and Hugh Miller with the evidence of the new land. [Illus 2 John Edgar, Compass. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]
For Golder, as for Miller, what human beings add to the material world is intelligence, manifested by voice and inscription, and morality. As Golder writes in ‘The New Zealand Survey’ (1867),
http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/GolNZS/poemGolNZS001-1.html
For Miller, Lunaticus’s three factors are manifested in a mental engagement with the Scottish geological present as a text to be deciphered by informed and imaginative reading, in contrast to a reading which imposes inherited conceptions on the landscape. As the title of one of his books puts it, his task is to interpret correctly ‘the testimony of the rocks’, a kind of work which requires extensive travel around Scotland and detailed local investigation and description in order to discover and constitute as knowledge the themes and patterns in the testimony. A brilliant example of this kind of work is the collaborative book, Rev Thomas M‘Crie, Hugh Miller, Rev James Anderson, Professor William Fleming and Professor Balfour, The Bass Rock: Its Civil and Ecclesiastical History, Geology, Martyrology, Zoology and Botany.The Bass Rock: Its Civil and Ecclesiastical History, Geology, Martyrology, Zoology and Botany. Edinburgh: John Greig & Son. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co, [1847?]. Miller makes the following observation about another ‘heap of stones’: ‘A pyramid of loose stones,--the work of some of the troops engaged in the great ordnance survey,--occupies the apex of the island. One is sometimes inclined to regret that these conspicuous mementoes of an important national undertaking, which in the remoter and wilder regions of our country furnish so many central resting points, from which the eye,--to employ a phrase of Shenstone’s,--“lets itself out on the surrounding landscape ,” should be of so temporary a character. Placed as most of them are . . .they would form, were they but constructed of stone and run lime, connecting links between the present and remotely future generations, that would be more honourable to the age of their erection than monuments raised to commemorate the ferocities of barbarous clan battles, or the doubtful virtues of convenient statesmen, who got places for their dependents. They might have had their little tablets, too, commemorative, like those of the Roman wall, of the laborious “vexilarii” who had erected them … (The Bass Rock, 106-107).
For Miller and for the other authors contributing to this history, significance and meaning are the product of the enmeshment of natural processes, human purposes, and divine providence. Just as Golder writes poetry to conserve his present for future recollection, so M‘Crie, the writer of the civil history, affirms his purpose as preventing ‘dumb forgetfulness’ and recording the facts confirming ‘the total perversion of justice’ signified by the human occupation of Bass RockThe Bass Rock, 22.
Miller approaches his analysis as a narrative of encounter, both his and, through him, the reader’s. It is set in the present, in the actuality of his visit to Bass Rock for the purpose of writing about it, rational and imaginative in respect of those phases of the rock’s history from which humanity is absent, and informed with his own knowledge and experience. As a preface to his detailed description of the geological history of the area between Edinburgh and North Berwick, Miller’s line of thought over several pages goes as follows:
it occurred to me as not a little curious, that the early geological history of a district should so often seem typical of its subsequent civil history… It is amid these centres of geologic disturbance,--the natural strongholds of the earth,--that the true battles of the race,--the battles of civilization and civil liberty,--have been successfully maintained by handfuls of hardy men, against the despot-led myriads of the plains… While pursuing this idea, a sudden turning of the road brought me in full view of the Bass, looming tall and stately through a faint gray haze, that had dropped its veil of thin gauze over the stern features of the rock. But the Bass, though one of the Plutonic strongholds of the earth … has been strong chiefly on the side of the despot and the tyrant…
In the quarry in which I first became acquainted with severe toil, and an observer of geological phenomena, I used to know when it was time to cease my labour for the day, by marking the evening sun resting over the high-lying farm-house of Brea,--the little patrimony from which one of the captives of the Bass—Fraser—derived his title. And from the grassy knoll above the hollow I could see the parish churches of two of its other more noted captives,-- M‘Gilligan of Alnes and Hog of Kiltearn. Hence many an imagination about the rocky Bass, with its high–lying walks and dizzy precipices, had filled my mind long ere I had seen it…
It is not uninstructive to remark, from facts and feelings such as these,--and the instances on record are very great,--how much more permanently
goodconnects itself with matter, in the associations of the human mind, thanevil… It was a greatly worse time than the present in this country, when the dungeons of the rock were crowded with this country’s most conscientious men. And yet how intense the interest with which we look back upon these times; and on the rock itself, as a sort of stepping-stone by which to ascend to their scenes of ready sacrifice, firm endurance, and high resolve …May there not be a time coming when the just made perfect shall look back upon all ill, moral and physical, with a similar feeling; when the tree of the knowledge ofgoodandevilshall grow once more beside the tree of life in the Paradise of God, but when its fruit, rendered wholesome by the transmutative power, shall be the subject of no punitive prohibition; and when the world which we inhabit, wrapped around with holiest associations, as once the dungeon-house and scaffold of a Divine Sufferer, shall be regarded—disreputable as we may now deem its annals—with reverence and respect, as theBassof the universe, and its history be deemed perhaps the most precious record in the archives of heaven?
The Bass Rock, 58, 61, 62-63
What must appear from a twentieth century scientific perspective as undisciplined speculation and a failure to define the boundaries of enquiry also reciprocally shows what is at stake in the present separation between scientific and moral knowledge. Determining and declaring the facts is necessary; but it is equally necessary to interpret their meaning, which is an expression and consequence of purposeful action. In another place Miller makes a distinction in modes and domains of enquiry which is resonant for our own time:
The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have ever been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science those truths were never yet to be found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision.The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Edinburgh: Shepherd & Elliot; London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. (1857), 259.
The fact of Bass Rock’s use as a prison by a tyrannical government turns into a sign of other facts, human and divine, in a manner similar to the way stones carry meaning in Edgar’s sculptures. It is the very lack of objects marked by their human origin in most of the fossil record Miller’s collection of fossils is held by the National Museum of Scotland. [Illus 3 John Edgar, The Bass Rock, 94.Flagstone. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]
The epigraph to Golder’s ‘The Philosophy of Love’ leads to another inscribed stone which recollects another moment in the religious and political history of Scotland. It reads: “’Hail, holy love! thou word that means all bliss…’ Pollok.” http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/GolPhi/GolPhiTP.html David Pollok, The Life of Robert Pollok (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1843; rpt. Kessinger Publishing, n.d.), 77.
The source of the epigraph is Pollok’s Christian epic poem, The Course of Time (1827), which went through more than 45 editions in Britain and North America through the nineteenth century, after which it disappeared. Pollok died shortly after its publication, and his brother published a biography which is the narrative of the formation of a writer who shared with Golder working-class poverty, limited access to literate culture, evangelical religion, and a close identification with traditional Scottish culture and local history, especially that of the covenanters. Their principal difference was Pollok’s university education and subsequent ordination as a minister in the Secession Church.
One anecdote in the biography took me to an upwardly sloping field crowned with woodland on the southern side of the Pentland Hills, where a small memorial stone records the first engagement after the Restoration of Charles II between government troops and the covenanters in 1666, at Rullion Green, which the covenanters lost. Pollok, whose family home was 10 miles south of Glasgow, at the age of 25 was making his first visit to Edinburgh. His brother first of all describes the events of the day which Robert spent on the Pentlands in the company of a close friend, and then quotes Robert’s commentary:
They wandered about Habbie’s Howe, and up and down the Pentlands, till it was beginning to grow dark, when they ascended to the top of Carnethy, the loftiest of these classic hills, and stood there, contemplating and worshipping, till the curtains of night closed around them. On descending from it, they held their way under the light of the moon, along the foot of the hill, for Rullion Green, and soon came down on a shepherd’s house, at which they called, enquiring for the hallowed field. The shepherd’s wife, telling them that they were close by it, sent along with them one of her children, a girl of about ten or eleven years of age, to take them to the stone set up on it in memory of the martyrs who fell there in the cause of civil and religious liberty, in the battle of Pentland Hills, fought in 1666. They walked, in silence, back and forward over the green, surveying it narrowly; and went and kneeled down beside the Martyr’s Stone, and, partly by looking and partly by groping, made out the inscription on it; then slowly and silently withdrew… it was glorious, he said, on concluding the account of it to me at night, while he looked to Mr Marr, his voice swelling up, and his eye kindling and glowing with enthusiasm as he spoke—it was glorious, truly glorious, after wandering the light of day on the soft hallowed bosom of the Pentlands, to stand, in the middle of December, on their highest top, nearly two thousand feet above the level of the sea, holding high converse with God, and hear the spirit of the blast drawing the curtains of night around us; and then to come down on the sanctified field of martyrs below, surveying it by the shadowy light of the moon, shed through the slow passing clouds, and groping, with our very hands, the stone inscribed and set up ‘for a memorial of them!’ Pollok, The Life of Robert Pollok, 218-219.
With this narrative in mind, I stood in a sense with Pollok at the stone, not needing to trace the incised letters with my fingers and assisted in imaginatively constituting the past by John Galt’s novel John Galt, [Illus. 5 John Edgar, Ringhan Gilhaize.Ringhan Gilhaize or The Covenanters. Ed. Patricia J. Wilson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1984). For the battle of Runnion Green, see 191-194.Saltire. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]
Miller, Golder and Pollok share social characteristics and qualities in which many pakeha New Zealanders still have a strong investment. All three came from agricultural and working class backgrounds; all three achieved literacy as the first step towards changing their status and role in society, and all published poetry as evidence of an innate capability; all three were evangelical in their religious position, but not socially radical; all three affirmed the harmony between science and religion as bodies of fundamental knowledge, and fully endorsed a progressivist conception of human society and history based in the advancement of knowledge as a process of moral and intellectual improvement; all affirmed a democratic conception of society and justice, firmly grounded in the traditions of the covenanters and their emphasis on religious freedom. Both Golder and Pollok grew up in the western lowlands, where the covenanting traditions were strongest, whereas Miller was brought up in Cromarty, on the dividing line between Celt and Scot, with one parent from each side of the line.My Schools and Schoolmasters. Edited and Introduced by James Robertson (1854: rpt Edinburgh: B&W publishing, 1993), vii.
Miller describes the role of poetry as follows:
The language of poetry can perhaps alone describe the happiness of the poet, who quitting the toils and cares of real life, transports himself into a paradise of the imagination, where there is neither toil nor care. While engaged among my brother workmen, in the labours of a tiresome and uncongenial employment, I have been wandering over the heaths of Ossian, a spectator at the battles of Fingal. While residing among strangers, in a bleak country, and exposed to the hardships and privations of the Journeyman Mason, I have seen all that is beautiful, and felt all that is pleasing.
Golder could have described his poetic work in exactly the same way, merely replacing ‘Journeyman Mason’ with ‘pioneer’; the last sentence certainly describes an enduring aspect of the effects of travel to a distant and foreign land. Included in his first volume published in New Zealand is an extract from Ossian http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/GolMin/poemGolMin039.html
This process of creation, inclusion and displacement was explored in a deeply affecting way by Calum Colvin, in his exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Tom Normand, Ossian. Fragments of Ancient Poetry,Calum Colvin’s Ossian; Oisein Chaluim Cholvin, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2002.Blind Ossian I-IX, Scota I, Twa Dogs, Portrait of Robert Burns, Portrait of Sir Walter Scott, and Fragments I-VIII, together comprise a complex and, in many ways, despairing meditation on the possibility of maintaining a national culture in the twenty-first century. The mood of this work is precisely the opposite of Golder’s assumption that to create a new nation in New Zealand would necessarily involve the creation of a national literature.
Colvin’s work provides a powerful context for John Edgar’s exhibition. Instead of Edgar’s perfected objects, [Illus 6 John Edgar, Sett. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]
A detail in [Illus 7 See the exhibitions link at http://www.calumcolvin.com/] John M. MacKenzie, ‘A Scottish Empire? The Scottish diaspora and interactive identities’, in eds. Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman, [Illus. 8 John Edgar, Blind Ossian I – an image in some ways like the images incised in the Pictish monuments – immediately caught my attention, for the obvious reason that it was a coloured picture of the head of a Maori man.The Heather and the Fern. Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin: Otago university press, 2003), 29.Fragments series, where the images of Burns and Scott morphed into that face, which then morphed into the face of ‘the Scotsman’ before vanishing completely and leaving only the cultural detritus of the last photograph. However specifically Colvin was intending to address a Scottish audience with his concerns about the loss of cultural identity, and however generally the image of the Maori man was intended (if it was) to signify the indigene as the representative of local, oral, pre-modern cultures assimilated (like the Picts and the Celts) by more powerful cultural groups, artistic and communicational technologies, and economic forces (including those of the nineteenth century British Empire, which Golder in his turn and in his own way introduced into New Zealand), to a New Zealand reader the exhibition gained a directness of implication which it would not otherwise have had.Landmark. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]
It was what I could call ‘the Golder connection’, a recognition that a Scotsman quite unrelated to me, except as one of the settler founders of Pakeha culture and the nation of New Zealand, has generated the travel, conversation and reading sketched in this response to John Edgar’s own reflections on the relationship between Scotland and New Zealand. It is a much more specific and personal connection than the intellectual and cultural history of the Reformation, which brought me first to Edinburgh all those many years ago. Colvin’s vision reverses the progressivist and evangelical conception of history animating Pollok’s, Miller’s and Golder’s thought and informing their ability to foresee a future in which human life would be perfected; but perhaps the difference is only that of the perspective adopted on the present, in which our possible futures are at best only perceptible in fragments and are constantly threatened by the social and economic forces undermining foundational meanings and cultural values. Anchoring these reflections is the theme, so powerfully informative of Scottish culture at home and in the world at large, of the fundamental importance in human life and society of religious and civil liberty.
In these respects, John Edgar’s contribution to our thought about ourselves and his relation to those uncertain futures is best expressed through the lustrous objects themselves and their calm dignity. As stone subsequently marked by human intention, these objects at once carry meaning into a process of time quite unlike that natural to the human body, and remind us how recent in geological terms the advent of humanity is. As signifying objects, linking matter and mind, they point beyond nature to that most distinctively human of realms, the resource of recorded knowledge and human experience. Like the fossil shells the design of which Miller wondered at and saw repeated in human arts, John Edgar’s signifying stones speak to us of the creative intersection between matter and mind, and the opening out on to humane meaning mediated by his works emphasises the ongoing, collective activity of cultural re-visioning and the myriad indeterminate pathways between minds along which meaning travels and is constantly renewed.