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The Heart of the Bush

2.The Education of a Husband and a Wife

2.The Education of a Husband and a Wife

“Of course I shall have to tame him when we begin married life in earnest.”Aidie in The Heart of the Bush

While Grossmann was personally interested in the idea of equality through education, she explores in the novel the ways that the natural world collides with both the world of culture, as exemplified by the literature and poetry shared by the lovers, and the class-informed assessment of London society translated to a colonial setting. At the same time, she acknowledges the harsh economic and pastoral realities of the settler society, as evidenced by agricultural practices in the country, including the establishment of the Freezing Works, and the Refrigerating Meat Company, that provide a social realism and a complication to the classic mode of the romance novel. Also of interest within the text is Grossmann’s exploration of the evolution of the romantic relationship between Aidie and Dennis. What begins as a fairly traditional trajectory of the romance trope becomes something more interesting by novel’s end, as Aidie and Dennis negotiate some different type of marriage, which becomes a topic of interest for the local community to comment on. The novel is presented in three main parts; the first dealing with the settlement of a romantic marriage between the two childhood sweethearts, both New Zealand-born, but one British-trained; the second part of the novel is an exploration of Maoriland on a honeymoon journey through the home valley and into the alps; and the final section focuses on the economic imperative of farming and agriculture. The relationship between Aidie and Dennis becomes the lens through which we can read this text as a romance, with all of the cultural inheritance that this implies.

The introduction has the heading ‘Love in Infancy’, and the author describes a young Dennis as swimming with ‘the agility of a fish or a North Island Maori’(The Heart of the Bush Sands & Company, London, 1910. 1), a child at ease in the bush exploring the edges of the farm. In a short space Grossmann describes the contrast between the two of the worlds that shape the novel; Dennis emerges from the bush, walking towards the main house, pausing on the edge of the ‘cleared ground where English grasses and gowan daisies and daffodils grew wild’ (2). This image acts as a metaphor for the entire novel. Grossmann has called this book The Heart of the Bush and what seems to come into play are the two ways this phrase can be understood; is the heart of the bush the deep interior that cannot be easily accessed, and must be removed to create a space for a new way of life?, or is it the idea of the heart as being the seat of love and sentimental notions for which the bush is a living breathing romantic entity?

The young Dennis is fascinated by the Borlases’ new baby daughter, imagining her arrival ‘by fairies from Elfinland and dropped … at Haeremai’ (4), and asks her mother if he might have the baby for his own. Happily, young Dennis is distracted by the offer of cake from the kitchen and is dispatched, while the baby’s father returns from his day on the farm. The description of return of the baby’s father from his day out on the farm allows that he ‘even in his farmer’s dress bore the conscious air of a gentleman… rather the worse for the … colonial life’(5) providing the agricultural grounding for the story, which begins with Adelaide’s return home from Europe.

The whimsical nature of Aidie’s upbringing becomes more apparent through the story, as each part reveals how little her fine education of English manners bears any relevance in the back country of the Grossmann’s fictional South Island district. Her honeymooning in the Alps and subsequent injury provide a period of reflection that presage her coming to terms with what Grossmann calls ‘the prosaic details of pastoral toil’ (229). Aidie has a slowly increasing comprehension of the sheer number of hours required for agricultural work, and as a modern gal, imagines that she will be able to mould and train her husband; she objects to her husband’s smoking and swearing, not on nineteenth century moral grounds, but on the grounds of good taste (for the swear words) and vanity (for the smoking). Dennis on the other hand has ambition for the farm seeking to develop it and the local district so that he can provide the type of life he imagines Aidie desires. He remains temperate, ‘even at his fondest he never lost his head and become foolish’ (238).

The business of running a farm causes friction between the couple: Dennis feeling manipulated by his wife into the Brandons’ society, and Aidie’s horrified discovery that Dennis had shot Rangi their childhood dog, after it had worried neighbour’s sheep. Patrick Evans calls this the ‘clash of the Arcadian and the Utopian’ and considers The Heart of the Bush a parable of settlement history that overtly figures the ‘Scenic Wonderland’ with the economic business of colonial capitalism.24 Australian historian Marilyn Lake describes the struggle for control of national culture at the end of the nineteenth century as ‘one of the great political struggles in Australian history’25 and in a way the “battle” between Aidie and Dennis can be seen in these terms. Certainly, descriptive language is used to describe Dennis, a ‘big, brown New Zealander’ (13) as a barbarian and a savage, and Aidie’s desire to train and educate her husband provide the template for civilising and domesticating the bush, and the bushman who lives there.

24 Evans, Patrick The Long Forgetting. Post-colonial literary culture in New Zealand Canterbury University Press, Christchurch. 2007. 118-119.

25 Stafford, Jane and Mark Williams Maoriland. New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 Victoria University Press, Wellington. 2006. 197.