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Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays

[VIII]

Of course, such a view implies that if the native doesn't co-operate, he must be taught a sharp lesson. And that is the attitude of that patchy exponent of the brotherhood of man, the Australian Henry Lawson, in his story 'A Daughter of Maoriland' first published in 1897.28 Lawson taught for about eight months in 1897 at a native school at Mangamaunu near Kaikoura. The South Island Maori were notoriously dispossessed and depressed rural outcasts in South Island society. The village itself had also suffered earlier from Te Rauparaha's invasion. Lawson's early disillusion is rather like that of those occasional South Island training page 54 college students of about fifteen years ago who, never having seen a Maori except on the street, thought it would be exciting to apply for a North Island Maori school and resigned the service within six months.

Lawson's story is of an altruistic teacher who has an ambition to be a writer and hopes to write romantically about a Maori girl pupil. For this reason he helps her when she poses as an ill-treated child and takes her into his home. She deceives him, steals the food, organises her relations against him till he loses patience and fires shots at them and they take to the heels of their horses. It turns out that her relations had plotted the whole strategy, so that they could live cheaply off the teacher. After that he had no more trouble. He gave up his 'universal brotherhood' approach and they respected him. This story is sub-titled 'A Sketch of Poor-Class Maoris'. The Maoris of the village are described as 'lower classes'. The girl is called a 'savage' and likened to a cow, a dog, and a pig; she brings 'a native smell' into the house; she is 'fat, and lazy, and dirty'. This is the only story I have read in which the adjective Maori is used as an epithet of contempt, as it is in these passages:29

(August has stayed overnight to look after a sick sister. She is to return to the teacher's at lunch-time.)

[She] had not touched a dish-cloth or broom. She had slept, as she always did, like a pig, all night, while her sister lay in agony; in the morning she ate everything there was to eat in the house (which, it seemed, was the Maori way of showing sympathy in sickness and trouble), after which she brooded by the fire till the children, running out of school, announced the teacher's lunch hour.

Her 'romance' was briefly as follows: she went, per off-hand Maori arrangement, as 'house-keeper' in the hut of a labourer at a neighbouring sawmill. She stayed three months, for a wonder; at the expiration of which time she put on her hat and explained that she was tired of stopping there, and was going home. He said, 'All right, Sarah, wait a while and I'll take you home.' At the door of her aunt's house he said, 'Well, good-bye, Sarah,' and she said, in her brooding way, 'Good-bye, Jim.' And that was all.

The hostility of these passages is consistent throughout the story. It is difficult to get behind the malice to sort out what most likely did happen: one more than suspects that the facts have been distorted by editorial comment.30 But what one notices especially is the unconsciously arrogant assumption that the scale of values of a white man from a colony of European culture in the 1890's (itself no model of enlightenment in its policy towards its indigenous people) is the standard by which the conduct of another people of a different culture and history is to be judged; themselves the victims of aggression and trickery from members of another colony of European culture. Evidently, to Lawson, the brotherhood of man is a closed shop.

page 55

No doubt Lawson's attitude represented the prejudice of a number of Pakehas of his time (and of a minority today), but they were not the sort of people who wrote fiction (and today are unlikely to write anything more than an occasional letter to a newspaper).

There were other attempts to reinforce current unsympathetic Pakeha attitudes. Two play on the popular fallacy that a man of mixed parentage is a vicious man because he inherits the worst qualities of both races.31 In one of them,32 the villain, just about to present a false grievance to his people, is arrested by a stereotype Irish policeman for robbery, deserting his wife, and other crimes. The writer of this story makes the remarkable statement that 'the older generation of Maoris knew but two conditions, of mind—the phlegmatic calm such as succeeded a big feast, and the wild ecstatic excitement which took charge of them when they danced the haka'.

Fundamentally, all these attitudes have one thing in common, a feeling of guilt about, and a distaste for, the contemporary Maori. The novels of the Maori wars that show him as fierce and treacherous or fierce and brave try to justify his present condition: either he deserved his defeat or he lost in fair fight. The romances look away from the present to a noble past, interpreted according to contemporary European literary attitudes, seeing him as a heroic but pathetic victim inevitably sacrificed to Progress. Pat Lawlor and his contributors and Fussell tame him into a comic figure, look for the 'good' in him and seem to imply that his present condition is how he likes to live: when you look for the good in anyone, you don't think much of him. Lawson tells you, quite firmly, with no nonsense, that he has to be kept in his present condition. In more subtle ways some of these attitudes persist in the modern stories of Maoris.

28 Lawson, Henry, 'A Daughter of Maoriland' in The Antipodean, 3, 1897. Reprinted in Over the Sliprails, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1900, and included in The Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1948.

29 Lawson 1948: pp. 283-4, 285.

30 I have considered the facts behind this story more fully in Henry Lawson Among Maoris, A.N.U. Press 1968.

31 Maori Mac, 'Harry Kingi's Broken Vow' in Gillespie 1930; and von Keisenberg, 'Within Sight of Kapiti' in Allen 1938.

32 'Harry Kingi's Broken Vow'.