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Thinking Technology: William Golder and Samuel Butler in the pre-history of New Zealand as a modern technological society

Arrival

Arrival

Both writers have left an account of their mental orientation towards New Zealand close to the moment of arrival. For Golder, it is a poem written on board the Bengal Merchant shortly before landing in the North Island, in Wellington in early 1840; for Butler it is the narrative of his first year in the South Island, following his arrival on the Roman Emperor in Christchurch in early 1860, and related documents including the Forest Creek manuscript. Golder did not publish a narrative of his sea voyage, but Alexander Marjoribanks, a person of similar social position to Butler who also travelled as a cabin passenger, did. This narrative includes a poem written at the same time as Golder’s; it is possible that Golder’s won the competition referred to somewhat disparagingly by Marjoribanks10. But in every way (including by the poem itself) Marjoribanks represents himself unselfconsciously as having exactly the kind of rule- and convention-bound mind which Butler believes prevents new perception and knowledge, and which he and Golder challenge in various ways in their writing.

A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) opens with an account of the sea voyage to New Zealand. While the society of the ship and its facilities reflects the stratified society of England, and especially differences in wealth, for Butler it exemplifies more importantly the qualities, opportunities and occupations which are put forward in Lunaticus’s letter as the means by which the human mind is developed, namely, ‘travel, conversation, or reading’ (LU, 197). What distinguishes the society of the ship from that in England is the amazing diversity of the knowledge and experiences of people on board, so that ‘one gains a great deal of information about all sorts of races and places … It awakens an adventurous spirit’ (FY, 82).

Butler treats optimistically11 the process by which disjunctions in knowledge and experience, past and present are made apparent and assimilated:

It is so hard for an Englishman to rid himself not only of hedges and ditches and cuttings and bridges, but of fields, of houses, of all signs of human care and attention that I can hardly hope to give any adequate idea of the effect it produces on a stranger. That effect is ceasing rapidly upon myself and indeed I feel as if I had never been accustomed to anything else – so soon does a person adapt himself to the situation in which he is placed (FC, 37).

Writing to communicate ‘an adequate idea’ of what he sees and experiences involves accepting the disruption of conventional ways of perceiving and reporting geographical relations while keeping track of effects as well. A good example is the long paragraph giving directions from ‘Mr. Phillip’s station to mine’, which concludes with the observation, ‘if one can get anything that can be manufactured into a feature and be dignified by a name, once in five or six miles, one is very lucky’ (FC, 37). The one name in this section of description is Maori, the Rangitata River.

Lacking a ‘satisfactory explanation of the phenomena’ in many instances, he contents himself with ‘narrating what I see’ (FY, 139). But this, in the context of Baconian induction12, is precisely what is needed in order to release the new from conventional knowledge, that is, from rule, dogmatism and self-deception (EC, 4, 6). Lunaticus affirms 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’ (LU, 197). Many of the facts narrated include dimensions of experience other than what is to be seen. Throughout the narrative, bodily sensations are recorded as Butler encounters wind, rain, heat, cold, flooded rivers, glaciers, and aggressive vegetation (‘Irishmen’ and ‘Spaniards’), learns how to enjoy camping out and to work with sheep and bullocks.

As Smithies has observed, the setting of the Canterbury settlement was dramatically different from other regions, especially in the North Island13. The view across to the Southern Alps achieved by climbing the Port Hills on the day he arrived in Lyttleton, Butler writes, is ‘rather of the “long stare” description. There was a great deal of country, but very few objects to attract the eye and make it rest any while in a given direction. The mountains wanted outlines; they were not broken up into fine forms like the Carnarvonshire mountains, but were rather a long, blue, lofty, even line, like the Jura from Geneva or the Berwyn from Shrewsbury. The plains, too, were lovely in colouring, but would have been wonderfully improved by an object or two a little nearer than the mountains. I must confess that the view, though undoubtedly fine, rather disappointed me’ (FY, 85). Trying, and failing, to fit what he sees into the frame of the picturesque is factually registered as disappointment, yet another instance of ‘the effect’ of the absence of all the marks of ‘human care’, the civilising of nature. His choice of similes is consistent with his advice about writing, assisting his intended but absent readers to imagine this actual world ‘beyond the pale of civilization’ (FY, 99) by invoking and combining fragments of shared knowledge of mountain areas in England, Wales and Switzerland. Lacking a ‘little auberge’ or any other ‘sign of human handiwork in the foreground’, the scene of ‘the rugged Alps’ is ‘too savage’ FY, 110, 104); the effect of the only partly civilized landscape near Christchurch is that of a ‘slatternly [copy]’ of English scenery (FY, 128).

Although Butler was more powerfully moved by the mountains when he got among them, the terrain of the plains and the river valleys provides the constant and immediate physical context for his experience of New Zealand. On one of his trips to the west, just out of Oxford, ‘for the first time I saw the bush; it was very beautiful; numerous creepers, and a luxuriant undergrowth among the trees, gave the forest a wholly un-European aspect, and realized, in some degree, one’s idea of tropical vegetation. It was full of birds that sang loudly and sweetly’ (FY, 98). Nonetheless, his typical experience of Canterbury is of ‘plains [that are] entirely destitute of timber’ and the ‘great scarcity’ of birds (FC, 43-44). It is this lack of vegetation, and the speed with which large tracts of land can be cleared for grass and sheep by the expedient of fire, which provides the route to wealth creation in this part of New Zealand, the main theme running through the narrative. Of ‘farming as we do in England’, Butler observes, ‘only bona fide labouring men … can make it answer. The number of farms in the neighbourhood of Christchurch seems at first to contradict this statement; but I believe the fact to be, that these farms are chiefly in the hands of labouring men, who had made a little money, brought land, and cultivated it themselves. These men can do well, but those who have to buy labour cannot make it answer’ (FY, 96). The critical difference between migrants is money, opportunities separating in the settlement as on board ship into two categories, for ‘those who come out with money [and] those who have none’ (FY,117).14

If Butler’s report on his initial encounter with the actuality of New Zealand is retrospective and therefore marked by the on-going adjustment of the expectations and knowledge which emigrated with him, Golder’s poem written shortly before arrival is entirely prospective, setting the scene of the initial encounter and therefore demonstrating how he had mentally equipped himself as a New Zealand Company settler. Many of the poems published in his first New Zealand collection, The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852), represent aspects of the daily work of the pioneer settler in a setting dramatically different from that experienced and described by Butler, and which Golder described in detail in the preface to The New Zealand Survey (1867):

It may well be said that New Zealand is the land for scenery; such that contains a vast amount of grandeur and picturesque beauty; not only so, but it also contains much that prompts enquiring wonder, when first is seen its lofty ridges covered with evergreen forests, and its deep ravines from which issue its many purling brooks, all beckoning and inviting the reflective mind to go far into the past of time, there to witness scenic phenomina which language almost fails to describe. But when we ascend a hill, which seems by some fortuitous cause to have been unproductive of trees, although clad with various kinds of fragrant shrubs, and other flowering plants of native yield and beauties; from such a height to overlook an extensive valley filled with one dense mass of forest, the mind is filled with awe to contemplate the amount of labour required before such can be subdued; but again lifting the eye towards the opposite horizon and seeing forest-clad hills overtopping others, and beyond these the snow crested summits of a loftier range rising before an azure sky, the mind begins to feel as overwhelmed in a sort of inexpressible delight… But again with no small interest too can we regard the approach of Enterprize and Industry, each, as with bridegroom integrity, come to divest Nature of those solitary weeds in which she has long been arrayed, in order to deck her with the garb of art, thereby adding fresh beauties to her native comeliness! The hardy settler, under whose guidance such civilizing influences are introduced, displays a courage and energy more worthy the world's esteem than all the exploits of Knights errant in the semi-barbaric ages of yore. The humble emigrant, as well as him of larger means, who leaves the refinements of an old yet increasingly civilized mode of being, and departing for other scenes and trials of which he can have no just conception, though inspired with a hope of doing well, even such may well be regarded as “Knights exemplar” in respect to the work in which they engage, such as conquering not only the wildness of nature, but also in subduing the savageness of fellow beings run wild, while introducing civilization into their habits and their homes; thus paving the way for the expected approach of universal peace and brotherly affection.

This description engages two aspects of nature at once, nature as the created world unmodified by humanity and nature as the material base of life, industry and prosperity. With respect to the second attribute, the difference between the Wellington and Canterbury hinterlands is complete and is summarily represented by the enormous effort of bush clearance to create farming land. Golder’s life in New Zealand conforms to the account given by Butler of the labouring man building up sufficient capital to own his own land and farm it himself, but nature is resistant in its uncultivated luxuriance to the satisfaction of human needs and intentions. Just as Butler’s hut is important to him as an enclosed space protected from nature in which transported culture can be enjoyed, so are the various homes Golder built during his more than 30 years in and above the Hutt Valley on the northern side of Wellington harbour, where the settlers from the Bengal Merchant were landed on Petone beach and initially lived in huts made of the materials used by the local Maori inhabitants.15 There was no tavern in Petone like the Mitre in Lyttleton – ‘so foreign and yet so English’ (FY, 84) – where, like Butler, Golder could disembark and go straight to dinner.

Golder’s poem, ‘Stanzas, Written while on the Voyage out to New Zealand on board the "Bengal Merchant”, January 14, 1840’16, while anticipating scenic beauty and ‘the fruits of an industrious toil’, is primarily an imagined address to the indigenous inhabitants of the new land. The speaker places the moment of arrival in the global context of ‘Britannia [and] her vast dominions’ and the mission of imparting the knowledge which underpins civilisation to ‘savage nations …Beyond her former ken.’ The expansion of empire as Golder represents it is a process of mutual exchange, the imperial nation representing the most advanced state of human civilisation and continuing to widen its knowledge as it shares with those lacking it the knowledge which has made its advanced state possible. Colonisation is a sociable process involving the exchange of land for knowledge, an exchange which is governed by ‘courteousness’ and ‘humanity’, in which the colonists offer friendship and good will in an environment of trust in order to fulfil a duty to other human beings who are, at that moment, unable to enjoy the benefits available to the ‘enterprising sons’ of Britannia. It is easy to read Golder’s account retrospectively, and treat it as an unhappy mix of ethnocentrism, self-deception and settler conventionalities, a reading a version of which he could have easily adopted after twelve years as a settler dealing with the challenging physical actuality of ‘New Zealand’s lovely isle’, other colonists whose behaviour was anything but courteous, humane and trustworthy, and its Maori people; but he published it nevertheless. I would propose that he regarded this poem as of major importance because it presents a theory of and plan for human social development which locates the imminent moment of contact in a double chronology, members of the human race meeting in 1840, but differentiated by representing the first and currently last stages of human evolution according to the stadial theory of social evolution.17 Somewhere near D’Urville Island at the entry to Cook Strait, only the past and the future can be given content; the past is doubled, being both the settlers’ ‘country we have left behind’, the ‘scenes frequented, now resigned’ and the ‘painful sacrifice’ of ‘parting, as on earth to meet no more’, and the ‘savage nation’ of the New Zealanders, The present moment (which is full in Butler’s narrative), is empty of actual content and replaced by the imagined scene of the colonist addressing the New Zealander, a scene which is an extrapolation from the theory and provides a mental model of civilised encounter. This is not an illusion to be corrected by contact with reality, but a template for action. Golder expects to actualise the envisaged scene by embodying and enacting it in his own person, in particular by contributing to knowledge transfer and its outcome, the collaborative transformation of nature through the application of that knowledge by ‘industrious toil’.

Oh happy plan!—ingenuously devised!—
To colonise New Zealand's lovely isle;
Bid Britons welcome—let their scheme be priz'd,
And let your vallies with fresh beauties smile;
No longer need your rich luxuriant soil
Bring forth to waste, without an owner's care,
While nature amply recompenses toil
With good abundance:—so make commerce, share;
Prove to the world no country can with your's compare. (37-38)18

This is not an easy or quick process; it is collective, and over many generations. But the outcome as Golder envisages it at this moment of arrival, and continued to envisage it throughout his life in New Zealand, is the further advancement of human civilisation through nation-building in this remote land, a future accomplished by the application of energy and conviction according to the most advanced knowledge and marked by the blessings of peace and abundance. As Lunaticus put it, ‘Every step of progress has been accomplished by physical exertion under the direction of mind … cannot act on matter but through the nearer or remoter agency of body’ (LU, 197).

10 Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in New Zealand (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., Cornhill; Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh; James Tegg, Sydney. 1847), 21-23: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/resource/marjoribanks.html.

11 This is in contrast to Golder, for whom unbidden recollection of what has been given up in order to relocate in a profoundly foreign territory runs as a theme of separation and loss through his writing.

12 Reflecting on the Great Exhibition in a lecture given at the Auckland Mechanics' Institute, W. Gisborne said, ‘when we mentally review the vast number of improvements, in extending the power and meliorating the lot of man, that have been made within the past two centuries, as contrasted with those that were made before that time, we are enabled also to appreciate the striking difference between the Utilitarian philosophy originated by Bacon, and the merely speculative philosophy of the Ancients which had for so many years swayed the mind of man. That difference has been beautifully summed up by Macaulay … "The philosophy of Plato began in words, and ended in words — noble words indeed ; words such as were to be exacted from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations, and ended in arts." (‘The Age We Live In’, New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 637, 22 May 1852, 3).

13 Smithies, 208.

14 FY, 178). He was successful in his immediate objective of ‘increasing capital’ to become ‘in a very short time … a rich man’ (FY, 118, 178); but much depended on the accident of timing (Smithies, 211).

15 See William Swainson, ‘Hutts [sic] of the first settlers Petoni Beach’ [1840s]: http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/resource/A-190-013.html

16 The New Zealand Minstrelsy, 35.

17 Brian Opie, ‘The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation’, 249-250; and ‘Futurity and Epic: William Golder’s ‘The New Zealand Survey’ (1867) and the formation of British New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Literature 22 (2004), 66-68: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OpiSurv.html

18 Golder’s note to ‘O happy plan’ reads: ‘Alluding to the Wakefield method of purchasing territory for colonization; then bestowing part of the land for the benefit of the natives, instead of taking the land by force, and exterminating its inhabitants, as has often been done by other nations in former years.’