Notes on Being a New Zealander

There are two educational establishments in Wellington of which I have more than surface knowledge, because my friends are in and out of both of them – these two places are Victoria University College and the Mount Crawford Gaol. In both places one can learn something and meet a number of hardshell psychotics – but if I were advising a new immigrant on the best way to come to grips with the New Zealand way of life, I would probably suggest he should apply for admission to Mount Crawford. The lack of concern for social categories which is supposed to be a mark of the Kiwi would be more developed there; the pre-occupations of the inmates would be less abstract; and moreover, in a country where there are few monasteries, the immigrant might do well to serve his apprenticeship with those who are doing penance chiefly for the faults of others. He would learn the subterranean language of those people who have never regarded the State as a good father, and emerge wearing his wounds like badges, a well-qualified Kiwi.

*

A man who had come recently from England remarked to me that the thing which struck him most about New Zealand was the appearance of our towns on Sunday. Closed shops, empty pavements, deserted rain-swept streets – a funereal limbo from which even the ghosts had gone. I had wandered through such waste areas a thousand times, in adolescence and early manhood, and more or less taken them for granted – ‘This is the way the world is. Leisure means solitude.’ But he was deeply disturbed. I pointed out that the people had either retreated to their family boxes, or headed out of town to the nearest beach. The urban void had no sinister significance. But he persisted in regarding it as a kind of secular Sabbatarianism, a dedication of our lives to the god of Absence.

*

When the first missionary landed at Whenuapapawaiwaikakariki, the last moa stood gloomily watching his boat pull in to the beach.

‘Goodness!’ said the missionary. ‘I didn’t know they had emus here.’

‘I’m not an emu’, saidthe moa sombrely. ‘There’s nobody like me anywhere else in the world. I take it you’re a missionary. One of those people who go page 401 around carrying a Book.’

‘That’s right,’ said the missionary. ‘I’ve come to preach the Word of God to these poor pagans who’re still eating one another.’

‘Look out they don’t eat you too,’ said the moa. ‘They’ve eaten all my relatives, and I’ve only escaped the hangi because I can run twice as fast as the wind.’

‘That’s your problem,’ said the missionary. ‘You should be extinct. But I’m just going to set the first spark to a fire that will sweep these islands from end to end and transform them into the Kingdom of God on earth.’

The moa coughed. ‘It so happens,’ he said, ‘that I, the last of my race, have been gifted with prophecy. My bones will stand in a glass case in a large dismal hall, and a man named Curnow will write several very obscure sonnets about me. You also will become a symbolic figure, admired but not imitated. Perhaps you are not aware that a whaleboat landed on this same beach two years ago, carrying a man called Murphy. He has already taught the local Maoris how to dance a jig, blaspheme their Creator, and brew poteen. You’ll have your work cut out, brother . . .’.

At this moment a spear whistled from behind a cabbage tree and cut short the existence of the last moa. The first missionary offered up a prayer and stepped ashore; but stumbled over his Army boots and found himself unwillingly embracing the soil of his adopted country.

*

Year after year the migratory birds circle screaming over that spot in the middle of the ocean where Atlantis disappeared. They cannot understand, misled by an ancestral instinct, that there are no green orchards, no fish-breeding lakes, no clefts in the limestone, but only the grey howling acres of the Atlantic. So each year scholars and scientists and poets go from this country to England, expecting to find their mythical Victorian mother with the calm Wordsworthian breasts and the nurse’s fingers. It is certain that if she ever existed, except in the fantasy of a morose squatter’s wife or whisky-mad remittance man, she exists no longer. Our adventurers find only a hovel in St John’s Wood, and if they are very lucky, a minor job dusting records for the B.B.C. Scraping the dog dung from their shoes at the door of their basement mansion, they think sullenly of the wide maternal expanses of the Canterbury plains, crowded with Co-ops and magpies, bordered by cone-shaped hills.

*

. . . he came
pale on that northbound ship, dreaming release
in the lion’s den . . .

page 402

These lines by Louis Johnson refer to the last voyage of Hart Crane, when he jumped into history from the stern of a boat in the Caribbean Sea. But they could equally refer to any New Zealand businessman crossing from Picton to Wellington, pursued by the Furies of bankruptcy and his third divorce. The circles of the Inferno are all here, though the door to them is hidden behind a false cupboard in your local Tourist Bureau – and who knows, the Purgatorio and Paradiso may be there as well. When a man recognises this, he has no need any longer to go abroad to find out who he is. In the last analysis, one’s country is the place where one has died most often. Patriotism is essentially a funeral rite for one’s buried selves.

*

A while ago, being tired of pen-pushing, I decided to see if wharf work would be a possible alternative. And so I found myself sitting in a small panelled cubicle with six other men. We were waiting to be interviewed. They sweated, rolled cigarettes, tapped their shoes, stared into space, and spoke rarely.

‘It’s a bit like going up the ramp to the abattoirs, isn’t it?’ I said to the big Samoan who sat beside me. ‘Except that there’s no electric prodder here.’

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘You’ve got it right, man.’ We shared some tobacco but said nothing more to each other. One after another, the men went through to the bigger room where their fitness for the job would be considered by three men behind a desk The old booze-tattered one knew he hadn’t got a hope; the young thin one who had had twelve jobs in three years, knew he hadn’t got much either; the Samoan didn’t talk the language well, and when someone is buying a commodity that has to last, you never know, they may be influenced by its colour. I didn’t come off well because school-teachers aren’t a good bet – they’re apt to want to shift again, and anyway they may have queer ideas about society, or other things that aren’t really the business of a man whose job is to do what he is told. The three men behind the desk were pleasant enough; but like farmers at a stock sale, they had to examine the teeth and the muscles of the creatures they were buying. It didn’t matter entirely to me – I had a job already. But for some of the men in the cubicle it mattered absolutely.

The electric prodder was there after all. Humiliation. The rock-bottom humiliation of any man who is regarded as a commodity. It had been more than ten years since I had felt the real electric shock. But in those men’s company I remembered what I had forgotten, and knew that slavery never dies – that the Marxists deserve credit for at least seeing the problem to which they offer so imperfect a solution – that Samson, blind and chained, is grinding corn for the Welfare State.

*

page 403

Observe this battle-hardened Digger. His tigerlike moustache and his eyes like frozen rissoles. He is almost what he believes himself to be: the greatest soldier in the world. Let us try to work out what brought this calamity his way.

Unnerved by the Plunket nurse and the fear of a third pregnancy, his mother let him yell himself into spasms while she watched the clock, waiting for three o’clock feeding time. He learnt that personal feelings had no effect on the world. The landscape that surrounded his home confirmed this impression: a wide uninhabited bay, trees bent by a wind that blew from the South Pole, a creek that could drown you, a school with a teacher who looked like a camel, and a football paddock where he froze each afternoon in a thin jersey. To get warm you had to get stuck in.

Puberty hit him like a bomb. His mind split in two. He came to associate the boredom of the Sunday sessions in the little tin church behind the toetoe bushes with safety: safety from the interior forces of a growing mind and body. His father let him use the family ˑ22, and he loved the clean wood and metal, the functional touch and smell of the instrument of death. The rabbit with its guts blown out was his other self, the dirty soft warm dark self that had to die. His worst dream was one of being very small and trapped in a rabbit’s burrow. He walked rigidly, did not speak much, and his face in repose had a worried look. Everyone agreed that he was growing up to be a fine young man.

Between fifteen and twenty-three he learnt to drive a tractor and bet on the horses. At the local dance he would wait uneasily for a quarter of an hour or so, sizing up the girls who sat round the room. To his mind women fell into two classes – those he respected, pillars of salt like his own mother, quite unapproachable on any human terms; and those whom he despised, cunning tricky little sluts who could lead a man into trouble. He would watch them dance with a growing sense of tension, but never leave the stag line; and it was always with a sense of relief that he headed for the ten-gallon keg at the back of the hall.

His greatest horror would be to be mistaken for a queer. Yet the one sacred love of his life is his attachment to his cobber Jack, who was killed beside him at the battle of Cassino. With Jack at his side he explored the Cairo dives; and emerged even more deeply convinced than before that the click of bolt in breech was a cleaner and a better thing than sex. With Jack he endured a hundred raging hangovers. With Jack, when the dive-bombers came over, and the old dream of being trapped in a burrow returned to him, he did not have to fear being laughed at or taken for a coward. So he passed through the initiation ceremony, with Jack, which the peacetime life of his tribe could not provide for him.

He came back from the War and married a good Kiwi girl who resembles his mother closely. He respects her deeply; but the emotional centre of his page 404 life is the periodic R.S.A. reunion. His unofficial collection of Lugers and rifles is one of the finest in the country. He finds the peace much harder to endure than the War, and is thinking seriously of volunteering for service in Malaya. He often says that the young people need a spell of military training to toughen them up. . . .

1967? (460)