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Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays

[XII]

Mr Gaskell has, however, written one of the best stories to do with Maoris, 'School Picnic' (1947).52 It gains strength because the writer makes no attempt to see things from the point of view of the Maori characters, but sees things completely through the mind of a Pakeha schoolteacher, though it is plain that his sympathies are not with her. In this story Miss Brown, a teacher relieving at a sole-charge King Country school, reluctantly gives up a Saturday to attend a school picnic organised by the parents. She is the first to arrive. She is disgusted with the food, the old women, the parents and the children. It comes on to rain and they are all crowded in the school-house singing and doing action songs. At last she can stand it no longer and accepting a coat they offer her, heads off in the rain along the four-mile bike-track to the stationmaster's where she boards.

The contrast between the outlook of Miss Brown and that of the Maoris could not be sharper, and the irony of the story is that it is the Maoris who are more civilised than she. She is, as Miss Sturm calls her, a 'sophisticated but uncivilised city bitch'. She is concerned with her clothes and her appearance; her ideal is Joan Crawford looking wizard over a cocktail; no tactic is too dirty for her when she wants George (back in town) and Vonnie threatens to cut her out. She is contemptuous of the elderly, and she cannot talk to the old women. She judges the Maoris by her own mean standards: if the men are laughing, she suspects that they are telling dirty yarns. She isn't interested in babies, though she is prepared to have one to make George marry. She won't object if the whole Maori race perishes; and she'd feel much safer if they acted like the comic Maori of the illustrated papers. Selfish and sophisticated pleasure is her ambition: pictures, launch-trips and bathing, cocktails, boyfriends, all as symbols of what she calls the civilised life. Her values have been created by Hollywood, Vogue magazine, popular songs and the advertisements.

At first reading, she makes you angry; but at second, she comes through as a comic figure. The irony of the story is that the Maoris are enjoying themselves and she isn't, that it is she who retreats, biking off through the rain to get away from what she calls a pack of bloody savages. It is the Maori scale of values that emerges as the stronger.

Mr Te Hau explained to me that in any situation a Maori is confronted with two codes of values, two courses of action, Maori and Pakeha; and that which one he chooses depends on the time, the place and the circumstances. Mr. Gaskell seems to understand this, because the two codes are there: the men organising the races and going out into the bushes for some beer, the women insisting on providing Miss Brown's dinner but, instead of the traditional Maori food, giving her a pie in place of her own dainty lunch. You can see the double code in the words of Terari, the first page 63 of the parents to arrive. He opens with a welcoming remark that could be applicable to Maori or Pakeha company:

'Hello, Miss Brown . . . You the first one here? Look nobody else here. You pretty keen on these picnic, eh?'

'You said ten o'clock, and look at it, nearly eleven.' Her eyes focussed, hardened.

So Terari switches to her point of view:

'Crikey, that late? By golly I ring the bell. Wake them up. Those lazy Maori must sleep in, eh? You can't trust those Maori. Always late.'

Of course, he may be pulling her leg, but he is anticipating all her objections, too. Terari has made such a gracious concession: what could Miss Brown say to that?

But then he's back to the Maori point of view.

'You didn't light the fire?'

It may be that he thought that was a woman's job; or it may be that he simply looked on her as one of the working party at the picnic.

'I certainly didn't light the fire.'

And, always resourceful, adaptable, not to be perturbed by mishaps like this, Terari says, 'Nemind'.

And you can see the two codes operating in the climax of the story, when Terari is posturing an action song in front of her and she slaps his face. Both the audience and Terari are speechless. Had it been a Maori who had insulted him, Terari might have taken offence, but here they solve the tension in laughter, and Terari clowns his way out of it. A lot of Maori jocularity comes from having to live in two worlds at once. And as Douglas Stewart says in his story,53 'understanding is easier than anger'. They were turning on a picnic for the kids, and bad feeling would have spoilt the day.

But again, the Maoris in this story, for all the accurate observation of detail, are stereotypes: they represent hospitality, generosity, unhurried-ness, enjoyment of life, and a communal spirit. They are not so simple as Mr Finlayson's Maoris, but they are still simple. Within the limits of the story, however, you could hardly ask for a complex picture of the Maori. And I don't think it fair to ask, as Miss Sturm did, are they always as happy as this, on the days when there are no picnics? have they no anxieties and problems ?—because this story is concerned with the picnic, not with days when there are no picnics, and mainly with Miss Brown the teacher, not with the Maoris.

Douglas Stewart's 'The Whare' goes deeper and recognises a complexity in the minds of his Maoris. This is the only Maori story in his collection, A Girl with Red Hair, published in Sydney in 1944. It concerns a young page 64 man trudging the roads in the depression of the thirties, who drifts into a Maori settlement near the Kaipara Harbour. He is offered permanent hospitality with an old couple who live in a flea-infested whare, who talk vaguely of him perhaps marrying a Maori girl, of working together on contract cutting rushes, of some day pouring boiling water on the fleas. He becomes panicky at the prospect of endlessly living with people whose thoughts he cannot share, and slips away in the night, leaving a note of apology. His story is of Maoris who have not had much contact with the Pakeha; like Mr Finlayson, he can still refer to them as natives.54 He doesn't romanticise or sentimentalise over the Maori way of life: he acknowledges the fleas, which Mr Finlayson would have thought unimportant. He neither approves nor disapproves of the man who has been college-educated returning to his village. He is aware that another generation might break the tradition of unquestioning hospitality. He is honestly enough rooted in Pakeha prejudice, when he notices that the old man's features were almost European, to say that he had 'the stamp of aristocracy' in his features. He is dismally conscious of the lack of common ground on which he and his hosts can meet; and there is among the three of them only the 'primitive human sympathy', 'that deep mindless sympathy', the 'dark tide of physical sympathy' touched with a vague sadness, while the rain drums on the iron roof.

It obviously isn't the fleas that drive him away, or the possibility of falling in love with a Maori girl. It is the fear of being trapped by their hospitality, of becoming a Pakeha Maori living with them but not belonging. It is this that puts him in a state of 'queer urgency, almost panic'. It would be for him a retreat from his own culture to have to sit and rely on that physical sympathy and not understand the complexity of their thoughts, as they would not understand his. And so he sneaks off in the night, feeling guilty.

This is a sensitive story because it touches a sensitive point of race relations; only it asks no questions, it goes no further. And again it is the Pakeha who is retreating. Was he justified, or was the challenge too much for him of having to attempt to bridge a gulf, to understand another conception of life, to adjust himself to another culture and outlook? I don't know. But it is worth thinking about. We couldn't expect him to give up his own culture completely. But there are many Pakehas who expect the Maori to do that.

In contrast to Mr. Stewart's story there is James Forsyth's 'The Roofs of Dargaville' (1947)54, that expresses the ignorant fear of the well-suited Pakeha: a commercial traveller in Dargaville is lured to visit the bach of some young Maoris who then try to overpower him and rob him. I don't believe that this story reflects any knowledge of Maoris: it is more likely what the writer thought would happen if he did dare to associate with Maoris.

A very recent development has been stories which treat not of Maori page 65 villages but of brief chance meetings with Maoris by writers who, because they distrust sentimental preconceptions of the Maoris, simply observe and record with a sympathetic detachment, not cold, but not warm either, nor very informed. O. E. Middleton's 'Discrepancies' (1951)55 observes the discrepancies caused by the double set of values mentioned by Mr Te Hau, and his 'A Day by Itself' (1952)56 seems to carry a faint regret that the two Maoris he meets are engrossed in an old motor-bike and lack his own preference for an unhurried, unmechanical life. In 'It Happens Here' (1951), however, he is warm with anger at finding a hotel bar that refuses to serve Maoris.57 Maurice Duggan's 'Chapter' (1955)58 observes with detached accuracy the conduct and attitudes of some Maori youths off to a dance somewhere in Northland, singing sentimental Hawaiian songs, enjoying themselves drunkenly and mindlessly. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the presentation of ready-made types. There is the novel of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Spinster (1958), and a few stories,59 expressing a teacher's bewildered admiration for the hectic energy of her Maori and part-Maori schoolchildren, their directness of feeling and their involvement with one another.

Increasingly, as more young Maoris move to or grow up in the cities, as more young North Island Maoris move to the South Island as tradesmen, apprentices, and other workers, one must expect to find that younger writers write of Maori characters not as members of a Maori community, as Mr Finlayson, Mr Gaskell and Mr Stewart have done, but as individuals they have known or worked with.

Sometimes such characters as they appear in some recent stories seem little more than brown Pakehas with easier consciences and friendlier faces; a sort of young Pakeha man's ideal of the decent joker. Certainly there is little appreciation that their background is very different, and none at all of tribal affiliation: these writers not only do not know, but do not think it matters, whether their characters are Ngapuhi or Ngati-Porou. At times the writers are regretful that the Maori character does not share a Pakeha character's concern for something, that the image they have seen is in fact an imperfect reflection. Thus Brian Fox in 'Talk to Them' (1957)60 writes as a trade unionist who, though he likes Maoris, is concerned at Maori labourers who provide scab labour during industrial disputes: he solves the problem by inventing one union-conscious Maori worker who, though he has been sacked from his work for assaulting a unionist who had been baiting some young Maoris fresh from the country, goes to the Community Centre and talks all night to them and wins their support for the 'go-slow' on the job from which he has been sacked. Mr Fox, like the vicar of Waiuku before him, has solved a problem by creating a Maori after his own desire.* A more convincing story by a Pakeha who calls page 66 himself 'Ngawha'61 is of a worker who is pained to hear his young Maori friend echo his foreman in expressions of anti-Semitism and resolves to tell him that he himself is a Jew from East London. Maurice Shadbolt's Mick in 'The Funniest Thing' (1957) cannot awaken any response in his fellow scrub-cutter Rangi to his garrulous speculations on life, death and the extent of the universe. In David Anderson's story 'The Stuff of Life' (1958) the Pakeha corporal is disappointed that the Maori lance-corporal will not help him in trying to prevent a cruel mob-attack by other soldiers on a soldier who is imbecile and doesn't wash: the implication seems to be that Pukaki the lance-corporal (who is little more than the stereotype of a cheerful, loyal fellow with an outsize penis) understands, as the corporal does not, that life involves cruelty.

The stories that I think are most successful in their treatment of Maori characters are two by Magdalene Giles and one by Maurice Shadbolt. In 'School' (1947)62 Miss Giles gives a warm and realistic account of life among the pupils of a Maori school; it is amusing, and in a human way. In 'Old Sam' (1947)63 she creates a sympathetic and dignified old man living away from his hapu with his daughter; though he has refused to return home, where there is no peace for him, his sons are coming to take him, but he dies on the morning they arrive. Both these stories are imbued with experience and understanding of Maoris, and a spontaneous sympathy otherwise only found in Grace and Mr Finlayson.

In Maurice Shadbolt's 'End of Season' (1956), a young Maori footballer, who works on his father's farm, who has two close Pakeha friends (but apparently, apart from his girl-friend, no close Maori friends of his own age), is killed at football. There is the tangi and burial and the story is concerned with the effect of Sammy Kahu's death on those who loved him. What I think is distinctive in this story's treatment of a Maori is the successful blending of an appreciation of Sammy as an individual and not a stereotype, with some knowledge and understanding of a different culture. It is, I suppose, not a spectacular achievement, and as an ideal for the Pakeha writer, it is a modest one. Yet that is probably, as yet, all the Pakeha writer can fairly do, observe with sympathy, be accurate in his observations, try to understand and be honest in his conclusions. As Miss Sturm puts it, if he uses Maoris as symbols, they must be true and significant symbols. But I think he is on dangerous ground if he uses them as symbols at all.

52 Reprinted in Davin 1953.

53 Stewart, Douglas, 'The Whare', A Girl with Red Hair and Other Stories, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1944. Reprinted in Davin 1953.

54 The word was in official use in New Zealand until 1947.

54 In Book, 9.

55 In Landfall, 5.

56 In Landfall, 6. Reprinted in Middleton, O.E., Short Stories, The Handcraft Press, Wellington 1953.

57 In Landfall, 5.

58 In Landfall, 9. Reprinted in Duggan, Maurice, Immanuel's Land, The Pilgrim Press, Auckland 1956.

59 'Agonies', Here and Now, 4.7, 1955; 'The Least Thing', Here and Now, 49, 1956; 'Floor', Here and Now, 51, 1956.

60 In Fernfire, 1, 1957.

61 'Morning Lift', Fernfire, 1, 1957.

62 In Canterbury Lambs, 2.

63 ibid.

* I do not suggest that there are not, or cannot be, Maori workers as loyal to union principles as other workers. My objection is that it is unlikely that a man sacked from his job will show so much interest in militating for better conditions on that job.