The Capital Graveyard

To come back to Wellington is not entirely a pleasure, even though some of the people for whom I care most in the world live here. Perhaps it is because Wellington itself suffers under the doom of being the country’s capital city. Other towns are different.

The scrub hills that surround Dunedin, however frozen they look in winter, appear to me a rough and ancient welcome mat. That town has never quite outgrown its original Scottish communal basis.

Though Christchurch is built on a bog, it is an English fortress with its own peculiar habits and atmosphere, made to defend the extraordinary values of a New Zealand squattocracy.

I find it hard to define the semi-Bohemian vigour of Auckland. But I do remember entering its fringes on foot from the south not long after midnight, when the lights were on in the suburbs. The ammoniacal smell of cattle yards, the shunting of trucks at a small suburban station, the wild fennel growing in factory yards – these combined to make a recognisable quality of disorderly vigour, a breath from the mouth of the spirit of the place, that said – ‘I was never tamed and never will be.’

But Wellington is another town again. In the past I have had time and opportunity to study its topography in great detail. Carrying a postman’s bag over these nondescript hills, in summer heat or horizontal winter rain, I was able to meditate at length on what failed to make the town tick – or hum or buzz or breathe or bellow. I came to the conclusion that its dominant spiritual quality was that of a gigantic graveyard.

What may seem an extreme, subjective comment does in fact have some historical relevance. When the machines which our civilisation so fondly worships were excavating the site of a new bureaucratic dungeon on the Terrace, I have heard they ripped out a number of brown bones from the hiding place in the clay where they were unsuccessfully endeavouring to wait for the Last Judgment.

Perhaps they were Maori bones. Perhaps they were not. But I do know that the early pakeha settlers, finding that their first habitations on the bank of the Hutt River were unseasonably flooded, marched into Port Nicholson with pistols and swords and surveyors’ pegs and measured out the Maori gardens and graveyards to make themselves a little Sparta of the South. I page 183 cannot imagine that this wholly unjust desecration and seizure of the lands of another race remained unnoticed by whatever hidden powers determine the shape of a culture.

Those who turn the world into a desert are condemned to live in a desert of the mind. Those who desecrate graveyards live in another kind of graveyard.

I am well aware that the dominating passion of my unfortunate fellow countrymen is an idiot desire to gain material affluence, even at the cost of turning their children into rebels or zombies and selling their grandmother’s bones for a dollar. It is in Wellington that our MPs make their notorious speeches about money.

In New Delhi, at the centre of one of the poorest countries in the world, Mrs Gandhi may certainly mention the rupee; but she also speaks about religion and language and minority cultures and a hundred other things. No doubt Mao Tse-Tung talks about money; but he also talks about the flourishing of a Hundred Flowers.

Our own politicians have reserved for themselves the peculiar distinction of dreaming about money, orating about money, meditating on money, till they resemble that cartoon character Scrooge McDuck, who does not feel healthy until he has had his daily swim in a tank filled with dollars and cents.

I remember pointing out something of the kind to our amiable Deputy Prime Minister, when he was trying unsuccessfully to convince a snoring phalanx of students that our present Government has the deepest interests of the people at heart. ‘Is there any evidence whatever,’ I asked him ‘that a further increase of our material affluence is going to make anybody one whit happier?’

He gave me an honest answer. He admitted that there was no evidence to this effect. He even said that his own private Christian principles indicated to him that there were spiritual priorities of much greater benefit to human beings. ‘But,’ he said somewhat sadly, ‘the people have shown what they want. They have supported the programme of our party and given us a sizeable national majority. We are obviously putting into effect the wishes of the people.’ I was obliged most reluctantly to agree with his logic.

Our single-minded worship of the Dollar Note has left its mark on our capital city. On several occasions I have watched the way in which we proceed to establish a new suburb on a hillside previously mercifully blanketed in gorse or scrub.

First the bulldozers move in and rip great avenues of raw clay among the scrub. Then the drains are laid down, with concrete sumps at regular intervals. Then, around each concrete sump, a box of wire and fibrolite and glass and other indeterminate substances is erected. Inside each box the necessary equipment of civilisation is placed – electrical fittings, plumbing, and various other identical appurtenances.

When they are furnished with wall-to-wall carpets and kitchen gadgets page 184 and TV sets and radio sets, these are the dreadful hutches in which our married women are driven mad by monotony and claustrophobia and a total absence of true communal living. What else can happen to them? When they look through their windows at acres of muddy clay with perhaps a couple of struggling shrubs, and miles of other hutches exactly like their own – what can they do but feel the tormenting presence of that metaphysical void which lies at the heart of our culture just where the impulse toward communal living was torn out by the roots and supplanted by an idiot hunger for things, things, things?

And this way of building suburbs around a drainage system is undoubtedly the cheapest possible and will fetch the quickest profits from those unfortunates who are already trying to raise their one-and-a-half children in vastly over-priced lodgings somewhere nearer the centre of the capital city.

It was not always like that. I have seen beautiful old houses both here and in Auckland. I have lain down in them and slept a blessed sleep with good dreams or no dreams at all. And I have stood and watched them being bulldozed to the ground so that uniformly hideous concrete-and-glass dungeons can be erected in their place and the landlords can eject the poor and take the rich boarders as tenants.

And I have prayed for the souls of the dead who had lived in the houses and known a way of life that their grandchildren will never know, a life which contained both a past and a future and not just the raucous demands of the money-hungry present.

‘But why pick on Wellington?’ I can hear some local patriot say, ‘Your remarks are true enough in general. We do live in a spiritual oubliette with only the few breathing-holes we manage to knock for ourselves. But it is the same throughout the country, wherever the urban grab and the urban sprawl have taken charge. Wellington is not worse than any other town. At least some of us have a good view of the harbour from our hillside kitchens.’

I pick on Wellington because I have lived here longer than in any other town and because it is the hub of our omnipresent bureaucracy. When the word goes out that some houses in a Maori pa are ripe for destruction, and when the machines start to shove down the walls of the houses at eight in the morning while the old people are still in bed – this has happened and can happen again – it is in Wellington that the word originates.

One has to think of a culture in terms of its centre. If our culture were sacred and human and personal, then the centre of our culture would bear the mark of it. One has only to think of Paris or Naples or Prague or Peking. These cities have each of them their terrible aspects. But they lack the uninhabited look of our city.

If you go through it at night it is a chilly vacant limbo, a city of the dead, containing many streetlights, a few sleeping drunks who have not been carted page 185 off by the police and the occasional late car loaded with explosive teen-agers. I remember how a hard-bitten educational officer from the Philippines once reacted when I told him that there was no night life in Wellington. In his own capital city of Manila he rode at times in a bullet-proof car. But he was unaccustomed to the Kiwi void. I think he was bewildered and somewhat horrified by it.

I do not think the town would be improved by a hundred night-clubs and gambling-dens. Yet neither is their absence a sign of our civic health and virtue. It is just that we accept calmly what runs close to being a Police State and have never had an idea of populating the social void with anything different.

It is as if we had isolated perhaps half the elements necessary for social and emotional survival – houses, possessions, jobs, transport, mass media, markets, offices, a few churches – and left the rest for God or luck to provide for us.

Our young people grow up with a vague but intense feeling of social deprivation. When one or two of them plant gelignite at the doors of the Supreme Court building in Auckland, I can understand well enough what the act symbolises, though I do not personally support an act that could injure people.

I have sat often enough in Court sessions and heard lies told by officials who were on oath to speak the truth. But the symbolic action has a wider and more disastrous connotation. An autocratic State breeds opposition. But a social and political void breeds nihilism, a violence whose agents cannot correctly identify the cause of their rebellion. The final answer is not police action. The answer is to irrigate the social desert.

There are two places in Wellington where I feel at home – I mean, in the town proper, at the centre of our depersonalised, desacralised society. The first is a pub where the vagrants gather. There I can go in and nobody will comment adversely on my bare feet and my beard. The tribe will be alive there, and if I have no money they will give me some, and if they have no money I will give them some. The tribe is not concerned with money but with one another.

As a boy said to me once in this particular pub – ‘If you pull out the plug in the basin the water has to go somewhere. That’s the way it is here. Here you’ll find just about everybody you know.’

I know that if I had no lodging, they would give me lodging. If I had no food, they would share their last meal of boiled turnips with me. That is because they are concerned with one another.

In a depersonalised society, their communal litany consists of an evergrowing list of Christian names. Harried often by the police, and refused the dole by our bureaucrats because they are not willing to shovel coal in winter or pour paint from one tin into another for months on end, these are page 186 in general the spirited and sensitive survivors of a culture geared to extinguish both sensitivity and the spirit of freedom. I always feel some joy in their company.

The other place is the church where I was baptised as a Catholic. There the rows of candles burning are reflected on polished brass in front of an image of the Blessed Virgin. How strange to see them burning, when outside the church doors the town itself is a vast altar erected as an act of worship of the secular trinity of the Dollar Note, Respectability and the School Certificate Examination.

In a sense the church has nothing to do with the culture, though some of the vagrants would feel at home there, since they have not lost the power to see existence as a sacred mystery. In that place it is suitable that I should light several candles for myself and the people I was born among.

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