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Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays

I

I

It is a funny place to start—but writing away from New Zealand, I have no check on far-fetched deductions but a subjective one: what it felt like to grow up at home. When I was seven my mother told me if I was ever playing on the hill or in the paddocks at the bottom I was to watch out for miners' shafts hidden under long grass and blackberries. I was awed, partly at the prospect of disappearing, as it seemed, without hope of recovery, twelve feet into the earth, but as well at the blandness with which a responsible adult could tolerate the continuance of such dangers. I felt they should have done something about it. Who is they? It could be argued that to me as a child they simply meant adults; and at that time I did impute infallibility to adults. But it is not only in me: they crops up again and again unnoticed in the talk of New Zealanders, a convenient fiction that covers a gap in their thought or illustrates a dimly-felt need—for what? Whenever you pin down the they, you will find it is in one case the borough council, in another 'the goverment', in another the drainage board; but the speaker will have to think before he can identify them: he will probably say 'the authorities' or 'the powers that be'. They is the symbol for authority, protective and unquestioned and only noticed when something goes wrong.

The New Zealander delegates authority, then forgets it. He has shrugged off responsibility and wants to be left alone. There is no one more docile in the face of authority. He pleads rationalizations, 'doesn't want to make a fuss' or 'make a fool of himself', but generally he does what he is told, partly because everyone else is doing it, partly because he wants to be sociable and co-operate in a wishfully untroubled world. Only when things go visibly wrong does he recall his right to question the authority and change it. When he complains half his bitterness is that he has been made to complain because he hates complaint and can't complain with dignity. Anyone who questions too often is a 'moaner', yet in New Zealand the moaner is common. Things never run so smoothly as the New Zealander pretends. So he is suspicious of politics—the anti-conscription campaign and the Stockholm peace petition were suspect not out of fear of communism but because the man who tries to stop the drive to war is reminding everyone of the moral responsibility he gave away with his vote.

This is closely connected with another implication of my awe at my mother's warning: a middle-class conception of a universe well-plumbed page 3 and shockproof, where there aren't shafts for boys to fall into. That is at bottom of the ideal world of the New Zealander, one that 'runs by clockwork'. You get up at a regular hour, go to work, you marry and have a family, a house and garden, and you live on an even keel till you draw a pension and they bury you decently. The New Zealand way of life is ordained, but who ordains it?

God? But few New Zealanders care about him: they don't doubt he is there, he must be; a New Zealander who never says 'Christ' except unconsciously as an expletive will jump to confute an atheist. God is at the controls but he doesn't need the New Zealander's recognition. God disposes, man reposes. The universe is well-oiled and if you stick to your tracks you'll have a good journey in this life. After that? Well, if you've lived a respectable New Zealand life, what sort of God would he be to complain? We'll mostly end up in heaven, seemingly in one endless family reunion talking over old times. Of course this is a bourgeois eschatology: it is more explicit in the attitude of elderly, comfortable suburban womenfolk. But I think it applies to the public assumptions of more New Zealanders than go to church. Now when the well-oiled universe grinds, there wells a vague resentment: when life turns up a vigorous uncomfortable side, there is rebellion. The New Zealand woman feels disgust at seeing an epileptic fit: she talks of cancer as if it was, like v.d. or the illnesses of Erewhon, a reprehensible disease. Why? Because there isn't the corresponding balance of a known cure. It looks as if the Creator forgot something. The patient isn't to blame; has God played fair? So again of violent or tragic death. Someone must be to blame; these things don't happen without purpose . . . : someone left a switch on, the driver had 'had drink'; and if not, then it shouldn't have been allowed—God is to blame. Under trial the New Zealand church-going woman is huffy: 'You're not the sort of God I was brought up to believe in.' She probably stops going to church, just to show him.

But, failing God, when the wrong affects more than one the solution is 'the government.' Even the champions of private enterprise expect government compensation when the crops fail. No people is easier material for governing. Though 'Hitler' and 'dictator' are common as terms of abuse (usually applied to a foreman who puts production before sociability) there is a lurking respect for the dictator because he has all the authority and gets things done without argument and compromise. When the Upper House went no one cared. It was only workers of the big unions, and the watersiders themselves, who were concerned at Mr Holland's emergency regulations, and a few intellectuals. Fascism has long been a danger potential in New Zealand. Of course fascism doesn't just occur: it is a deliberate strategy used by money-makers threatened with social discontent. But in countries nominally democratic, fascists have first to prepare the ground. In New Zealand the ground is already prepared, in these conditions: a docile sleepy electorate, veneration of war-heroes, page 4 willingness to persecute those who don't conform, gullibility in the face of headlines and radio peptalks.*

New Zealanders may well wake up one day to find a military dictator riding them and wonder how he got there. If the National Party was more astute it would have a V.C. as its party leader. You can't inherit freedom; yet most of our institutions are inherited and there is no common understanding that they were born of struggle. Even if the Upper House answered no need in New Zealand conditions, it is a check to power removed. Again there is a popular respect for summary justice. In Auckland during the war there were rumours that American soldiers sentenced to death by court-martial were taken to sea in launches, shot and dropped overboard. Whether the rumours were true or not, I don't know: what disturbs is the undertone of admiration with which they were repeated. The Yanks, one was told, didn't fuck around. There was a very real danger that the emergency organization of volunteers willing to assist police and provide scab labour in the 1951 dispute might have turned into a minor local Ku Klux Klan.

Not that New Zealanders would long tolerate a one-man government that hurt. I say that so long as the autocrat, like Peron, manipulated the sentiments of the people and governed broadly in the interests of the most powerful class, few would raise moral questions about the principle of dictatorship. Mr Holland, governing by radio, without a parliament, seems to have emerged from the waterfront dispute more popular than ever. The reason why the New Zealander is willing to invest his responsibility in a strong, benevolent ruler is that he himself is afraid of responsibility. He especially fears any position that raises him above 'the boys'. How many of us refused stripes in the army, just out of that fear. In the war, an airman turned police constable explained to me that he only joined the force to get out of going overseas and anyway he was indulgent to servicemen, looked after them when they were drunk rather than run them in. You may object, well he did join the force rather than risk his life. What I mean is that he felt no shame in owning to cowardice, but had to apologize for taking a job of potential hostility to his mates. Infantrymen who joined the Provost Corps would explain that really it was a good thing if chaps like them were M.P.'s because they would be easier on the boys than 'some other bastards' would be. They had to explain their decision as being in the interests of the boys they felt they had deserted. Possibly the boys aren't convinced and don't co-operate: the n.c.o. or provost becomes guilty and bitter and all the harder on them. Of course in civilian life there are other inducements to raising oneself— page 5 money, the demands of wife and family: these are accepted by society in its contrary idea that a man has to get ahead, look after himself. But the man who has raised himself, say from miner to deputy, or hand to foreman, is faintly haunted so long as he works with the men once equal to him. Off duty he probably takes care to drink with them; at work he will establish himself by confiding in the older hands who knew him before he rose, and being tough on the newer ones, who no doubt are 'a different stamp of material altogether, don't know what work is, most of them'.

* The Australians were far from docile in their reaction to the proposed anti-communist bill. It seems we are the most fertile testing-ground for legislation dreamt up not by the National Party but foreign diplomats: reactionary legislation is following the same pattern in four 'White Dominions.' We always were a social laboratory.