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Cultural Ballast: Stones and meanings flowing in time and space

Culture in the Ruins of Empire

Culture in the Ruins of Empire

Miller, Golder and Pollok share social characteristics and qualities in which many pakeha New Zealanders still have a strong investment. All three came from agricultural and working class backgrounds; all three achieved literacy as the first step towards changing their status and role in society, and all published poetry as evidence of an innate capability; all three were evangelical in their religious position, but not socially radical; all three affirmed the harmony between science and religion as bodies of fundamental knowledge, and fully endorsed a progressivist conception of human society and history based in the advancement of knowledge as a process of moral and intellectual improvement; all affirmed a democratic conception of society and justice, firmly grounded in the traditions of the covenanters and their emphasis on religious freedom. Both Golder and Pollok grew up in the western lowlands, where the covenanting traditions were strongest, whereas Miller was brought up in Cromarty, on the dividing line between Celt and Scot, with one parent from each side of the line.21 They were all inheritors of and contributors to the process begun in the eighteenth century, after the Act of Union, and represented most fully by MacPherson, Burns and Scott, of creating a Scottish national literature, a cultural imperative which Golder transferred to New Zealand.

Miller describes the role of poetry as follows:

The language of poetry can perhaps alone describe the happiness of the poet, who quitting the toils and cares of real life, transports himself into a paradise of the imagination, where there is neither toil nor care. While engaged among my brother workmen, in the labours of a tiresome and uncongenial employment, I have been wandering over the heaths of Ossian, a spectator at the battles of Fingal. While residing among strangers, in a bleak country, and exposed to the hardships and privations of the Journeyman Mason, I have seen all that is beautiful, and felt all that is pleasing.

Golder could have described his poetic work in exactly the same way, merely replacing ‘Journeyman Mason’ with ‘pioneer’; the last sentence certainly describes an enduring aspect of the effects of travel to a distant and foreign land. Included in his first volume published in New Zealand is an extract from Ossian22 which signified, along with the traditional song tunes to which he wrote new lyrics, the presence of his cultural inheritance in the new place and the process whereby that inheritance would contribute to the formation of a new national literature and be modified in the process. One immediate way in which the modification is marked is by the replacing of Scottish local names in his lyrics by Maori place names.

This process of creation, inclusion and displacement was explored in a deeply affecting way by Calum Colvin, in his exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Ossian. Fragments of Ancient Poetry,23 which was by chance open when I returned to Scotland for the first time to research into the cultural, historical and literary contexts informing Golder’s poetic aims and practice, in 2002. The series of photographs which made up the exhibition, Blind Ossian I-IX, Scota I, Twa Dogs, Portrait of Robert Burns, Portrait of Sir Walter Scott, and Fragments I-VIII, together comprise a complex and, in many ways, despairing meditation on the possibility of maintaining a national culture in the twenty-first century. The mood of this work is precisely the opposite of Golder’s assumption that to create a new nation in New Zealand would necessarily involve the creation of a national literature.

Colvin’s work provides a powerful context for John Edgar’s exhibition. Instead of Edgar’s perfected objects, 6 finely crafted stones bearing meaning and designed to encourage beholders to give them words, Colvin’s photographs are of constructed ruins, the stones marked with incisions which could be Celtic or other patterns, or made by stone cutting or by natural action. The catalogue accompanying Colvin’s exhibition provides an insightful commentary on the works, but their overall effect is to suggest that the cultural forces breaking down meaning in our time are irresistible. The photographs certainly evoke the final stage in a cycle, which Miller and his co-authors all regard as common to natural and human history, the cycle of creation and destruction. The ruins are littered with fragments of cultural production, emphasising the entropic conditions progressively degrading the work of cultural construction. The images of the cultural creators – Ossian, Burns, Scott and Macpherson – are themselves progressively degraded and lose their iconic identity.

A detail in Blind Ossian I – an image in some ways like the images incised in the Pictish monuments – immediately caught my attention, for the obvious reason that it was a coloured picture of the head of a Maori man.7 For me (unlike, I expect) most Scottish viewers of the exhibition, this signified “Aotearoa New Zealand” and established a very specific connection with the works. The strangeness was striking, not least because analogies were soon made after settlement began between Maori and Highland culture24. Once noticed, the fragment kept appearing, assuming an increasing prominence, as the curving lines of its moko meshed with the curving lines on the stones of the ruins and then, in the Fragments series, where the images of Burns and Scott morphed into that face, which then morphed into the face of ‘the Scotsman’ before vanishing completely and leaving only the cultural detritus of the last photograph. However specifically Colvin was intending to address a Scottish audience with his concerns about the loss of cultural identity, and however generally the image of the Maori man was intended (if it was) to signify the indigene as the representative of local, oral, pre-modern cultures assimilated (like the Picts and the Celts) by more powerful cultural groups, artistic and communicational technologies, and economic forces (including those of the nineteenth century British Empire, which Golder in his turn and in his own way introduced into New Zealand), to a New Zealand reader the exhibition gained a directness of implication which it would not otherwise have had.8

It was what I could call ‘the Golder connection’, a recognition that a Scotsman quite unrelated to me, except as one of the settler founders of Pakeha culture and the nation of New Zealand, has generated the travel, conversation and reading sketched in this response to John Edgar’s own reflections on the relationship between Scotland and New Zealand. It is a much more specific and personal connection than the intellectual and cultural history of the Reformation, which brought me first to Edinburgh all those many years ago. Colvin’s vision reverses the progressivist and evangelical conception of history animating Pollok’s, Miller’s and Golder’s thought and informing their ability to foresee a future in which human life would be perfected; but perhaps the difference is only that of the perspective adopted on the present, in which our possible futures are at best only perceptible in fragments and are constantly threatened by the social and economic forces undermining foundational meanings and cultural values. Anchoring these reflections is the theme, so powerfully informative of Scottish culture at home and in the world at large, of the fundamental importance in human life and society of religious and civil liberty.

21 My Schools and Schoolmasters. Edited and Introduced by James Robertson (1854: rpt Edinburgh: B&W publishing, 1993), vii.

23 Tom Normand, Calum Colvin’s Ossian; Oisein Chaluim Cholvin, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2002.

7 [Illus 7 See the exhibitions link at http://www.calumcolvin.com/]

24 John M. MacKenzie, ‘A Scottish Empire? The Scottish diaspora and interactive identities’, in eds. Tom Brooking and Jennie Coleman, The Heather and the Fern. Scottish Migration and New Zealand Settlement (Dunedin: Otago university press, 2003), 29.

8 [Illus. 8 John Edgar, Landmark. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]