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Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays

[IX]

There were also attempts to exploit the mystery of tapu and makutu: often unbelievable ghost stories written only to play on a reader's sense of awe. Such is Dennis McEldowney's story 'By the Lake' (1947).33 In this story a boy who enters an old burial-cave disappears and a new skull appears on the ledge: a shepherd had previously disappeared and they found only his boots. Now it is true that some of the old-time Pakeha had a great respect for Maori beliefs, and it is true that breaking a tapu can, or at least until recently could, so oppress a Maori with guilt that he becomes sick and dies. But tapu would not so affect these Pakeha of Canterbury, to whom the Maoris are only a memory, as it is made out to do in this ghost story. And if tapu kills, the body is there waiting for tangi and burial; it does not just disappear, so that a new skull appears in a cave. Again, when the old shepherd was spirited away his boots were left behind, but what happened to his clothes? I suppose this story does represent some sort of awe at the past and at a culture not understood, just as the early 19th century felt strange emotions in contemplating ruined medieval abbeys. But there are rational ways of understanding a strange culture.

page 56

Just as incredible is the story of Constance Player-Green, 'The Bird of Rameka',34 in which a Maori woman, spurned years before by an English lover, kidnaps his daughter. A tohunga, as wily and evil as tohunga usually are in such writers, inspires a magpie with his own malicious spirit so that when he dies the magpie is the girl's constant guardian and keeps her mad. She becomes sane again as soon as the bird is throttled. In the same collection of stories Arnold Cork's 'Te Atua'35 tells of a man who, believing himself possessed by the spirit of an ancestor, walks in his sleep with a hurricane-lamp, scares his chief to death and his fellow-villagers to evacuation until a Pakeha surveyor shoots him in self-defence. In an obscure way I suppose these stories represent the conflict of European and Maori cultures: two of them dabble with mystery but celebrate the triumph of a materialistic culture, and in Mr McEldowney's story European culture suffers a small depredation.

A more credible story is Phillip Wilson's 'Whare Fever' (1947), in which a Pakeha gum-digging in Northland with a Maori partner comes up against a mystery he respects though he cannot understand it. The young Maori becomes inexplicably ill and the cause seems to be guilt at violating some tapu; the illness disappears when the Pakeha suggests that they should move south.

33 McEldowney, Dennis, 'By the Lake', Book, 9. Reprinted in Davin 1953.

34 In Allen 1938.

35 In Allen 1938.