Susan L. Kinnear's paper on Settler Mythology: Colonial paladins in John Mulgar and Denis Glover was a fascinating read for me and shook my NZ surveying, gold and coal mining roots. For those like me who revere Denis Glover, it comes as a shock to get another sobering perspective on a writer and poet,' two men alone.' I won't say more, but I hope you will enjoy.
Susan
L Kinnear, June 2011
There has always seemed to
me something basically wrong
with young men who grow up
in comfortable circumstances and
cheerfully accept the
conservatism of an older generation.[1]
John
Mulgan
Schoolboys at Auckland Grammar in the late 1920’s, John Mulgan and
Denis Glover shared a passion for rugby, the sea and a joint goal of creating
what they perceived to be a distinct literature for an increasingly independent
New Zealand. Mulgan’s Man Alone and Glover’s poem sequences Sings Harry and Arawata Bill helped to ‘install as the dominant discourse of New
Zealand fiction’ a narrative that was laconic, terse, white and almost
exclusively male, rejecting both older writers and women novelists as
irrelevant in the New Zealand context. [2]
This chapter will explore the representation of the ‘man alone’ in
the work of both Mulgan and Glover; arguing that rather than creating a unique
voice for New Zealand, the settler stereotype of the old prospector who saves
Johnson in Man Alone, and Glover’s
ore panning Arawata Bill, evidence
not a rejection of colonial literature, but a ubiquitous continuum of the
colonial settler myth. Their definition
in opposition to the land, desire to exploit and obliviousness to the presence
of the Maori does not carve a new identity for the New Zealand male; it
continues one started a century earlier with the controversial Treaty of
Waitangi.[3] The paper will further demonstrate how both
the inclusion and subversion of the pastoral idyll by both writers, while
recognising the ambivalent relationship between the working man and his
environment, demonstrates the Pakeha’s continuing colonial dominance over both
nature and native in this ‘new’ national literature.
Both Mulgan and Glover disparaged the ‘old poets’ of New Zealand;
the writers, publishers and men of letters in early 20th century New Zealand
that Hilliard terms ‘the bookmen.’[4] While Mulgan criticised his own father for
the pastoral romanticism of his novel A
Pilgrim’s Way in New Zealand,[5] which Mulgan viewed as derivative of colonial sentimentality,
Glover dismissed all women’s writing as ‘feminine-mimsy’[6]
by ‘’girlie-poets’[7] with staid Victorian
values. In his 1937 poem The Arraignment of Paris, which lampoons
New Zealand’s women writers and the men who published their work, he writes:
Alas New Zealand
Literature distills
an atmosphere of
petticoats and frills
(or shall we say,
to shock the dear old vicars,
an atmosphere or
brassieres and knickers?)[8]
The one topic that characterised the new, muscular literature of the
1930’s above all others was the ‘man alone.’
Jensen argues that while Mulgan’s novel supplied the name ‘... the man
alone was said to manifest himself in the drifting men of Sargeson’s stories
[and] the solitary male figures in Glover’s poem sequences Sings Harry and Arawata Bill...’[9] This motif is characterised not simply by
the chief protagonist of Mulgan’s novel or the voice of Harry in Glover’s Sings Harry sequence, but by the
colonial archetypes each writer uses to exemplify what is good and missing in
modern society. It is the frontier
settler that initially saves Johnson from near death in Man Alone, and Arawata Bill whose heart and soul are full of the
gold he seeks in the mountains. This
argument is further exemplified by the second paladin of the old sea dog,
battling alone against nature and the wrath of the sea, and rejecting the
comfort and companionship of home and hearth for a life of salt spray and
adventure. In Man Alone this old captain is the complementary trope of the
prospector, who shows Johnson a type of honourable trust, selflessness and
kindness that is missing from the younger generation in the novel.
As such, each author reveres aspects of the colonial society they
purport to oppose, demonstrating Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence.[10] Theirs is a triumph not of content, but of
form; not a new ‘poetry,’ but a new ‘style.’
Their supremacy as ‘strong poets’ is a phenomenon witnessed across
centuries by Bloom, where an emerging poet struggles to free himself from the
influence of his forebears, but here, ultimately fails to separate himself from
the continuum of the colonial paladin that links him to the older generation.[11] Their triumph was, instead, to stylistically
instill an essentially working class, ‘harsh, laconic, bitten-off masculine
dialect’ into cultural consciousness as the new literary identify of New
Zealand.[12]
Arguably, Mulgan and Glover were ‘strong poets‘ in every sense. University educated first-class scholars,
competitive, accomplished sportsmen, both men had attended the workers riots of
1932 as special constables, only to find themselves ‘facing the wrong way’ when
they reached the barricades.[13] Campaigners for social equality through
literature and commentary, both subscribed to the political left and
romanticised the worker as the emblem of human dignity. Both volunteered for military service during
the Second World War where Glover was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross
for saving hundreds of drowning marines during the D-Day landings, and was
recognised with a Soviet Veterans Medal for running suicide missions against
the Nazi’s to supply Murmansk.[14] Mulgan fought his way through North Africa
where most of his battalion was cut down, then parachuted into occupied Greece
to run partisan resistance operations against the Axis forces. He became a national hero for the mountain
peasants, who came out of their villages to adorn his mule with garlands of
flowers as he shadowed the retreating Nazi’s.
He was awarded the Military Cross and made a Lieutenant Colonel, before
committing suicide in Cairo, and became the inspiration for the New Zealand
intelligence officer in Louis de Bernière’s
Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
Their distinguished service records, argues Jensen, gave additional
credence to their role as warrior writers and ‘... added a special weight of
masculine authority to the new literature.... Glover and Mulgan... seemed close
to that ideal combination of literature and manliness, the whole man.’[15] It is perhaps, not surprising, therefore that
they were able to stylistically supersede their literary forebears who they
regarded as ‘precious, flowery, sentimental, socially naive and out of date.’[16] Indeed Pat Lawlor, a poet, journalist, and
novelist of the ‘old guard,’ as well as founding member of New Zealand’s PEN
(Poets, Essayists and Novelists) society in 1934, criticised the modernist, and
in Mulgan’s case realist, writing style published in the nation’s premier
literary journal at the New Zealand Writers Conference in 1951, complaining
that:
Landfall has little or no regard for
spiritual values or for interest in home or family life. As both are
intimately concerned with art and literature... such regard is, to me, incomprehensible... we are reaping a
whirlwind of trouble from the disordered writing
of the days we live in... Admittedly the old writer has been squeamish, fearing to look at a strong word or a woman’s
stocking, but the modernist goes to the
other extreme and has thrown open his awful closet of profanities and obscenities.[17]
New Zealand’s ‘new’ modern writers therefore, like their
predecessors, were interested in literary traditions emanating from Great
Britain; indeed Hilliard observes that poets such as Glover’s friend Allen
Curnow were ‘just as concerned with Britain as the author of Home: A Colonial’s Adventure.’[18] In debating the value of New Zealand’s new
‘modern’ literature therefore, Glover and his contemporaries demonstrated their
own colonial lineage from imperial Great Britain, where the identity of the
periphery aped the dominant culture of the centre. Indeed, Hilliard argues that ‘... it would be
simplistic to regard the bookmen as die hard anglophiles and their challengers
as nationalists. Many of the younger
generation were attuned to British literary trends from TS Elliot to the left
leaning poets of the 1930s such as Auden and Spender.’[19]
Indeed Mulgan edited Auden and Yeats at the Oxford University Press and Ogilvie
argues that almost all of Glover’s entire output could been seen as mediated by
Spender.[20]
The stylistic triumph of Mulgan and Glover, in some ways, is not a
story specific to New Zealand and echoes contemporary cultural debate in Britain;
as Hilliard notes: ‘... a younger generation questions moral orthodoxies,
writes more frankly, and their elders think they are peddling smut; young
people mindful of the avant-garde write ‘free verse’ that their seniors see as
yet another sign of modern degeneracy...’[21] What is unique about New Zealand’s ‘strong
poets’ is that, even with their supposed new voice, their narrative replicates
colonial myths; the pioneer, the prospector, the adventurer, the sea captain. They aggressively rebuff any validity for New Zealand women writers, portraying women in
their own work as degenerate or vacuous, such as Rua and Mabel in Man Alone, and fail to incorporate any
but the most derogatory Maori representations.
Indeed, New Zealand novelist Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson) complained of
being bullied for her writing style by Curnow and Glover before committing
suicide in 1939, and Hilliard notes that an entire generation of women writers
in New Zealand were effectively silenced by the hegemony of Glover and Curnow in
literary circles. As such their
arguments over the direction of poetry are conducted in ‘highly gendered terms’[22] that specifically exclude
the ‘other’ which figures ‘only by its representational absence.’[23]
Jensen attributes this overt aggression to the engendering of war as
a rite of passage in New Zealand men. He
claims that ‘... soldiering is an activity which our writers present as
integral to New Zealand masculinity, starting in childhood when the topic of war
seizes boys imagination.’[24] Mulgan reflects on this in Report on Experience where he describes
the First World War with almost mythical reverence:
We had never, in
fact, outgrown the shadow of that earlier war, which our fathers had fought. It brooded over our thoughts and
emotions. Old wars take on dignity and grandeur. As children we had heard men’s stories,
coming home, had stood silent in
parades of remembrance, knew the names of old battles and heroes as part of our lives. We felt the tragic waste and splendour of
this first Great War, and grew up in
the waste land it had produced.[25]
The troubled isolation of the old veteran of both war and life is a
motif that both Mulgan and Glover turn to repeatedly. Such a man is inexpressive and distrustful of
articulacy, and as Allen Curnow notes, ‘... in every New Zealand poet, almost,
there is a streak of the “Kiwi” - our word for patriotic common man - who
disapproves, distrusts, or despises the personal voice.’[26] This flat, male voice is evident in both
Glover’s Harry and Mulgan’s Johnson as inflexible and unemotional, even in the
face of extreme violence. For example
when Johnson kills Stenning his response to Rua is entirely consistent with
that of a work-hardened, care-worn ‘cow-cocky’[27]:
‘My God,’ she said,
her voice rising, ‘you’ve killed him.’
‘I didn’t kill
him,’ Johnson said, without emotion. ‘He
tried to kill me.’
She gasped, looking
fearfully at the dead body of her husband.
‘God,’ she said,
her voice dropping again to a whisper.
‘God, and he’s dead now.’
Her hands were
clenched and her eyes were staring at Johnson.
He moved uneasily.
‘He’s dead all
right.’ Johnson said. ‘We can’t help
that now.’[28]
For New Zealand male intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century,
Jensen argues, such scenes of death and violence are of particular interest for
their masculine connotations.
‘Literature that focussed on these topics would always be able to
present itself as a serious business, the work of ‘responsible adult New
Zealanders.’’[29] This tone of voice and ‘serious’ subject matter
was in direct contrast to the miniature and myth of Mansfield and Hyde and, as
Hilliard notes ‘... a national literature that had Sargeson and John Mulgan
with their realism and their concern with the culture of men, as its exemplary
fiction writers, had little place for the ‘fantasy’ of some of Hyde’s novels.’[30]
This culture of men is exemplified by the archetypal pioneers Glover
and Mulgan portray as bastions of decency in an otherwise degenerate
society. For Glover these men, Harry,
the rural labourer and Arawata Bill, the eponymous fossicker, embody ‘qualities
which Glover clearly finds very attractive,’ who survive by their own efforts
and choose ‘... to stand apart from their fellows, needing nothing, but giving
nothing either.’ [31] Harry and Arawata Bill demonstrate qualities
that, Thomson argues, ‘... acquisitive urban man was likely to have lost sight
of.’[32] They had achieved a liberated condition of
existence that was at least valuable, and perhaps even ‘ennobling.’[33] The poems Songs
in the Sings Harry sequence open with
a small boy, a ‘pupil’, learning all he can from the vast manifestations of
nature around him:
From the cliff-top
a boy
Felt that great
motion,
And pupil to the
horizon’s eye
Grew wide with
vision.
Sings Harry in the wind-break
Rather than being a new literature for New Zealand and for the
twentieth, rather than nineteenth century, it is an almost direct correlation
to Wordsworth’s Prelude. The boy is soon broken by civilisation and
‘grew to own fences barbed.’ Confronted
with all the wonders of the Pacific, the boy, when a man, chooses instead the
menial life of urban settlement:
Who once would gather all Pacific
In a net wide as his heart
Soon is content to watch the traffic
Or lake waves breaking short,
Sings Harry in
the wind-break
To further highlight the colonial sentiment behind the poem, the
imagery throughout is of adventure, chase and capture. The boy could chose to trawl the pacific with
the net of his heart, capturing the North Islands ‘like stars/in the blue
water’ or wrestle with ‘old Tasman, the boar’ who ‘Slashes and tears’; nature
will respond with ‘Mountainous anger’ to this grand colonial endeavor. Or, he can sit ‘fat as a barrel’ behind his
own urban fence and leave the sea ‘never disturbed’ as ‘nothing to do with me’[34] while other men conquer the
Pacific. This conquest of land and sea
is a recurrent them in the Sings Harry sequences,
where Harry ‘rode a whole island for my horse’ and hears the morning ‘sound of
the axe’ and ‘bush-buried shot at mountain deer.’[35] Religion accompanies the the settlers and all
must learn that ‘only Christ, not Cortes/Can land upon the beach.’[36] Land acquisition, bush clearance, hunting and
aggressive Christianity are all present as emblems of the colonial settler’s
impact on New Zealand.
Thomson eulogises such verse as ‘... fixing an imaginative
interpretation of the land;’[37] if so, such an
interpretation is anchored by white settler mythology and the exploitation of
New Zealand’s natural resources for profit, as Harry illustrates in The Casual Man:
Come, mint me up
the golden gorse,
Mine me the yellow
clay
- There’s no money in my purse
For a rainy day
However, while Harry is a fictional character, Arawata Bill is based on the historical figure of William O’Leary,
a prospector and ruby miner from Otago.
His was a solitary, self-contained, life-long quest for gems and ore,
illustrated by Glover through brightly coloured adjectives and sparkling verse:
But where is the
amethyst sky and the high
Mountains of pure
gold?[39]
As Glover wrote in 1953, he saw old Bill as perpetually searching
‘... for something intangible round the next bend’ and the poems are riddled
with the imagery of anticipated acquisition.[40] But Bill is unlucky:
Dreams don’t pay;
There’s no gold the
easy way[41]
He is left instead with shingle, and starts to question if the real
gold of New Zealand is actually the solitary mountain life it offers:
But the mountains
on the rim of the day
Have nothing to
say.
Am I stealing their
gold
As a gipsy steals a
child,
Am I frisking their
petticoats
The sequence itself, argues Thomson, is a quest where ‘... more has
been found than was sought...’[43] and while Glover strives to
appreciate the beauty of New Zealand and it’s oceans in his poetry ‘... it is
nearly always the activity of man which has endowed the landscape with
significance.’[44] Nature is seen not as valuable in its own
right, but valuable for what it offers Bill.
Conversely in Man Alone, the
land is portrayed as raw and mean for its refusal to yield up sufficient crops
on Stenning’s farm.
Mulgan’s colonial archetypes are more both more generous and more
sociable than Glover’s. Bill Crawley,
the frontier settler and some-time gold panner, and the old whaling captain
Petersen both represent a better age in Man
Alone; an age apart from New Zealand’s financial disasters in the 1890’s
and 1930’s. While Billy Crawley doesn’t
like strangers disturbing his bush hut and Petersen prefers to smoke than talk,
they are timeless characters who live in harmony with their surroundings and
exhibit a heroic and selfless generosity that ultimately saves Johnson in his
hour of need.
Petersen is a ‘giant of a man with a drooping moustache.’[45] Johnson works for him for a pound a week on a
coastal scow, loading and unloading packing cases around the Bay of Islands,
but it is Petersen’s ‘half-cast Maori cook’ who does Johnson’s share of the
sailing duties.[46] Like all good wily old sea dogs he has
journeyed far and had his fair share of women.
A colonial adventurer, he has some tales to tell, but he is a moral,
uncomplicated man who knows how to look after himself and doesn’t care much for
conversation. The extremely short
sentences mirror his matter-of-fact ‘manly’ speech patterns as he grunts and
swears his way through their dialogue:
Petersen had
travelled. He was a Swede, born in Nova
Scotia. He had worked on a whaler and round the islands. He had been married twice, once in San
Francisco and once in Singapore:
the first wife had died and the second had disappeared. He was
sixty years old. He talked about men he
had met and places he had seen sometimes,
but not very often. He was a simple
man. He cared a lot for the old Sea-Spray,
which was his life’s savings.
He tries to warn Johnson of the dangers of itinerancy, but Johnson
disregards this advice, saying:
‘I don’t worry
about not having a ship of my own, Pete.
I don’t worry about that any more
than I worried about not having a farm.
There isn’t any better country than this,
not where a man can go about and get work, and stop when he wants to, and make money when he needs it, and
take a holiday when he feels ready for one.’
Petersen acknowledges that this is ‘... the way all sailors live’
but calls Johnson a ‘bloody fool’ nonetheless and to some extent, the remainder
of the novel proves Petersen’s warning right. Johnson doesn’t take the advice
of this old colonial trope; he doesn’t save, his work dries up in the
depression, he gambles and drinks, and is reduced to a life of squalor on a
farm so indebted to the bank that it makes insufficient money for even basic
standards of living. In the end,
harried by the police and facing a life term in jail, it is Peterson, the old
hero of the colonial era, that Johnson turns to for shelter and escape. Having been rescued from near death in the
bush by the old settler, Bill Crawley, he is spirited away from danger by the
old sea dog, Petersen. Like Bill
Crawley, who has lived in the bush for decades, Petersen is a constant feature
of his environment with ‘grizzled eye-brows and blue eyes sunk deep,’ and ‘had
not changed in any of the time Johnson knew him.’[47] Despite this affinity with his environment,
he demonstrates predictably colonial and derogatory attitudes towards the
Maori, describing the the Maori of the Bay of Islands as ‘lazy bastards’[48] and Rua as a ‘whore.’[49]
Eventually, Petersen retires from the sea to build himself ‘... a
trim little white painted two-roomed cottage’ on the beachhead of a deserted bay
with ‘... a neat garden and paths paved with shells.’[50] Tucked away from civilisation he plans, like
Bill Crawley, Arawata Bill and Harry, to live out his days in the
wilderness. Thomson argues that, in
Glovers poems, this retreat to the frontier masks a deeper anxiety:
A life in the
country or the mountains certainly seems to be the form of existence most desired by Harry and Arawata
Bill... [b]ut do they really feel the country is their natural home? Is it not a
means of escape from an even more unsatisfactory alternative... one which proves in its turn to be incapable of
salving the ache in the heart... or
of providing that mystical grail...?[51]
For Glover, theres is an anxiety of seeking a ‘gold’ outside of
themselves that lies instead within, but from a postcolonial perspective, this
is also the anxiety of possession; a crisis of belonging not to the land they
have usurped, but the oppressive civilisation they have escaped.
Likewise, Huggan and Tiffin note that Allen Curnow’s ‘... ironic
ballad House and Land (1941) is
frequently taken to be an exemplary study of postcolonial white settler anxiety
of the crisis of belonging that accompanies split cultural allegiance, this
historical awareness of expropriated territory, and suppressed knowledge that
the legal fiction of entitlement does not necessarily bring with it the
emotional attachment that turns “house and land” into “home.”’[52] This is evident in the cupidity Johnson
experiences in Man Alone in the
mechanised farm of the Blakeways and in his sterile relationship with Mabel
where Mabel’s father has ideas about buying a farm:
‘You don’t want to
go on taking wages from that red-faced bastard all your life,’ he said.
‘You want to keep your eye out for a bit of land...’
‘You get a good
team of horses and hire them out and work around with them. You make
money that way. You want to get
half-cleared land and bush land and clear it...’
Mabel’s father was
back in the old days, the pioneer days, when you had to bake bread if you wanted to eat bread, no
groceries coming in three times a week on the cream
lorry. Mabel’s grandfather had shot
Maoris for his bit of land. Mabel had ideas about farms, but they ran on Scotty’s
lines with a small deposit and the government
scheme; and Johnson listened desultorily, having no ambition.[53]
Mabel’s father preaches the morality of land acquired through hard
work, but holds his own entitlement through his father, who stole the land from
the Maori through murder, and from nature through bush burning and tree
felling. Gurnah argues that no
civilised, rational argument can be put forward for dispossessing the native of
land and freedom in such a manner, ‘... but since the native can be represented
as a metonymy of the wilderness - therefore in need or ordering and “taming” -
then to that extent he can be made subject to colonial understanding.’[54] If we accept this we can argue that the
Maori, like the African ‘is both part of the landscape, one and the same with
it, eternally signifying that which Western discourse has banished through
progress, and is also dangerous and disturbing, preferably represented as
absent.’[55]
This is evidenced by Man Alone;
banished by Mabel’s grandfather, the Maori are indeed absent from Blakeway’s
land, apart from as the pejorative ‘... little Maori car driver.’[56] This is an established, profitable farm run
on a European farming model with modern equipment where milking ‘was as much
like working in a factory as anything else’ and where the farm hands are white.[57] It is a different environment to Stenning’s
farm in the King Country, where, having confiscated Maori land later than in
other parts of New Zealand after resistance from the Kingite movement of
Tamihana Te Rauparaha, the white settlers further exploit the dispossessed Maori
as workers on unprofitable, inhospitable land that, by the end of the 1930‘s,
was left desolate and abandoned.[58] This further evidences Gurnah’s argument
that:
If we accept Harold
Bloom’s suggestion that a trope is a defence against literal meaning in discourse, then it is possible to
conceive the exotic as at once irretrievable
essence and alien other. So the
landscape and what it signifies are simultaneously
an exiled self whose spirit modernity crushes and a nameless ‘other’ that must be controlled or expelled.[59]
Both these elements are evidenced by the representation of land in Man Alone, where working on the
mechanised Waikato farm is a dehumanising experience that leaves Johnson
‘desultorily,’ while at Stenning’s farm, the Maori are the nameless ‘other’
excluded from their entitlement and exploited for profit by the white man. To some extent this is a subversion of the
traditional notion of the pastoral; the ‘simple’ farmer who leads a ‘worthy’
life in tune with nature, far away from the ‘immorality’ of the city or
civilisation. However, it continues to
demonstrate the colonial view of land as there to be ‘taken’ by the adventurer;
wrested from both nature and native and converted into a pastoral pastiche of
Europe, in this case into New Zealand as ‘the Empire’s Dairy.’[60]
This process demonstrates what Huggan and Tiffin define as ‘... the
legitimation of highly codified relations between socially differentiated
peoples: relations mediated, but also mystified, by supposedly universal
cultural attitudes towards land.’[61] These pastoral ideologies work towards the
stabilization of land by the dominant order, through both land management’ and
the exclusion or ‘silencing’ of less privileged social groups.[62] To complete the process, familiar colonial
buildings are erected, native fauna is burnt back and non-indigenous pines and
grasses planted to create a Utopian Arcadia:
Going down to the
farm by service car was seeing a new country open out... It had a green, rich, unfinished look. The road ran out into loose metal and ruts
through low hills half cleared,
and farm houses, wooden, unpainted.
Where the land was cleared
as it was for miles at a time with fences and no hedges, the grass grew springing with life.
‘Top-dressing,’ said Sam, the little Maori car-driver, smoking green
Three Castle and driving with one hand.
‘They spread it
like butter hereabouts.’
Johnson got to the
farm in the slack period after lunch. It
was a large farm with a great
iron milking shed as big as a village hall, the farm-house half a mile in from the road surrounded by dark pines. They dairy flats ran in from the banks of the
dark Waikato. They stretched for miles with only cows and
odd sheds and pine trees to break
them, as flat and dull as the back of your hand.[63]
Described as such, the Waikato is denuded to resemble the
post-enclosure English countryside, while the traditionally idealised life of
the herder is subtly undermined through the use of ‘flat and dull’ at the end
of the passage. Huggan and Tiffin,
however, argue that the pastoral is ‘... predominantly European in sensibility
and form. The stylistic conventions of
pastoral are not easily mapped onto non-European landscapes that often appear
to be in direct opposition with them, and their value-system likewise.’[64] This is also evidenced by Glover’s The Magpies where his protagonists live
a simple life, but are ultimately broken by the value systems of the ‘Mortgage
corporations’ that do not match their pastoral vision of ownership through
effort. Throughout, the distinctive caw
of the Australian magpie signals consistency in a nature unchanged by colonial
effort or corporate greed.
When Tom and
Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made
their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Tom’s hand was
strong to the plough
Elizabeth’s lips
were red,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Year in year out
they worked
While the pines
grew overhead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
But all the
beautiful crops went
To the mortgage-man
instead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Elizabeth is dead
now (it’s years ago);
Old Tom went light
in the head;
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
The farm’s still
there. Mortgage corporations
Couldn’t give it
away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The opening line here which states how Tom and Elizabeth ‘took’ the
farm epitomises the ‘use it or lose it’ mantra which the colonial settlers used
to confiscate land from the Maori under the pretence that it wasn’t being
farmed effectively.[66] Mulgan evidences this in Man Alone with Bill Crawley, who was
employed ‘riding the fences’ of a farm to protect it from encroachment by the Maori.[67] The positive portrayal of
Bill therefore tacitly approves such colonial conduct, and to the archetypes of
colonial life in nineteenth century New Zealand. Likewise in the Sings Harry poem Once the Days, Harry calls himself a fool for ‘leaving/Good land to
moulder, Leaving the fences sagging’[68]
and in I Remember recollects:
... paddocks
opening green
On mountains
tussock-brown,
And the rim of fire
on the hills,
And the river
running down;
And the smoke of
the burning scrub,
And my two uncles
tall,
And the smell of
earth new-ploughed,
And the antlers in
the hall,
Sings Harry
...
My father held to the land
Running good cattle
there[69]
For both Tom and Elizabeth, and Harry’s father and uncles, their
land acquisition brings capitalism and western ‘civilisation’ to the land, and
therefore strife and greed. Tom and
Elizabeth lose their farm to the banks with disastrous personal consequences,
while Harry’s Uncle Jim dies in the Boer War and Uncle Simon rides off after a
row. Like Johnson, despite their
‘simple’ pastoral life, they are destroyed not by nature, but by a social
system that encourages debt and confrontation, and exploits the working
man. This demonstrates Duggan and
Tiffin’s argument that the pastoral is ‘... heavily dependent on the very class
system it claims temporarily to suspend; but while it generally appeals to
fictions of contentment and social harmony through its pleasingly domesticated
images of working farm and fruitful garden, it conveniently forgets the
division of labour that makes such productivity possible.’[70]
While Johnson and Glover both have a political agenda to promote
socialism and do recognise the
dehumanising social divide of working class rural exploitation, they both
adhere to this pastoral cliche by representing as moral the supposedly ‘simple’
life. In his study of the pastoral,
Empson points to the deployment of ironic humility in the affectionate
representation of this supposedly ‘simple’ way of life to a much more ‘complex’
people. Such representations are ‘...
primarily designed to reassure patrician or bourgeois audiences that these
‘simple’ lives contain truths and insights which, being universally applicable,
are relevant to themselves.’[71] This is evidenced in Arawata Bill where the old prospector’s shovel, while described in
violent terms as a weapon, is to be used against a ‘wicked country.’ Bill is a simple, honest man with a heart ‘as
big as his boots’ and dressed in simple, country garb of ‘blue dungarees and a
sunset hat.’[72] It is not he who is immoral in his
prospecting, but the land who hides her gold from him. This is alluded to again in The Search where Bill seeks;
...between mountain
and sea
In country crumpled
like an unmade bed
Whose crumbs may be
nuggets as big as your head
...
Wet or dry, low or
high,
Somewhere in a
blanketfold of the land
Lies the golden
strand.[73]
Arawata Bill doesn’t shave but ‘let his whiskers grow’[74] like old Bill Crawley in Man Alone who ‘... had long white
hair... and a white beard stained yellow round his mouth.’[75] While the language used in both Glover’s
poetry and Mulgan’s novel emphasize the direct and ‘manly’, these old
prospectors who live in the mountains are portrayed as Arcadian peasants while
Harry is a romanticised rural labourer.
They are old timers that speak truths and can be relied upon to exhibit
manly virtues such as lack of vanity and a craftsman’s care for their
tools. Arawata Bill’s rusting shovel in
the ground, although it has been there long, has a handle ‘good and strong’[76] while Bill Crawley knows
how to survive in the wilderness as ‘there’s a lot of living in the bush if you
care to look for it.’[77] Their simple lives hold idealistic truths, as
Harry sings philosophically in The
Flowers of the Sea; ‘For the tide comes/And the tide goes/And the wind
blows.’[78] They live fulfilling lives of contentment and
humour; Bill Crawley chuckles to himself and reminisces on his past, while
Arawata Bill talks to his horse and jokes about ‘cutting a dash’ in town in his
old boots.[79] As highly idealised gold panning pioneers,
what they both seek is in their own hearts, as Glover states in The End:
RIP where no gold
lies
But in your own
questing soul
Rich in faith and a
wild surmise.
You should have
been told
Only in you was the
gold.[80]
In contrast, Stenning in Man
Alone does not lead a simple life, but one characterised by boredom and
poverty, or what During refers to as ‘the labour and isolation of settlement,’
where his mortgage on both land and stock is the defining feature of the farm.[81] A sombre Gallipoli veteran who married to
have extra help with the work, he is motivated by cupidity and ultimately
jealousy:
The economics of
Stenning’s farm were simple.
‘You see, Johnson,’
he said, ‘in a good year I used to make three or four hundred from wool and lambs. I didn’t use to keep cows except one or two
running around near the house. Then I married Rua and she came and could
help milk, and so I got the cows in
to keep the house going. Used to drink
condensed milk in the tea before then -
by God, I’m not sure it wasn’t a better life.’
He laughed at his joke. He didn’t often laugh.[82]
His chief aim is not the pursuit of gold, but to ‘own this bloody
piece of land before I die.’[83] In this respect he evidences what Meeker
describes as ‘... the founding fiction of colonial possession’[84] where the ownership of land
is the primary purpose of life.
Meeker further argues that the garden farm is the midpoint, ‘... a
place of mediation between nature and civilisation’ but also the point where the
two worlds make contact and create conflict.[85] Stenning evidences this argument through his
inability to settle; this is the third farm he has attempted to own and
failed. His response to his environment
is framed by his goal of ownership so that ‘while he can leave behind the
fearsome environment of civilisation and its cities, yet the psyche of
civilisation remains to guide his responses to nature.’[86] Meeker’s proposition is that man cannot
reject the confines of civilisation without rejecting his own humanness, ‘...
so he seeks a compromise in the halfway house of a pastoral Arcadia, somewhere
midway between the horrors of wilderness and the horrors of the city.’[87]
But Stenning destroys his own Arcadia through his insistence on
ownership and, in turn, destroys the Arcadia Johnson seeks through the
conditions of servitude and poverty imposed by ‘civilisation’ on the farm. Johnson runs to the wilderness for refuge,
but can no more survive the ravages of the wilderness than he can the city, and
becomes gradually dehumanised to the point of madness:
Johnson lost all
real count of time there in the dark loneliness of the bush. There was
sound all the time, of the river running, and birds from early morning to the
owls calling at night, but he
felt within himself a great solitude, a feeling which had never troubled him before in the long periods
of his life that he had spent alone.
There was a heaviness of the
bush that pressed upon him and weighed him down, until the sound of his own voice was startling to him.[88]
Unable to fend for himself any longer, Johnson is saved by Bill
Crawley, the colonial pioneer who has been in the bush since the ‘Great War’
against the Maori in the 1850’s. He gradually regains his mental composure as
he is nursed back to a health by a man who doesn’t judge him for killing
another man, but calls him instead ‘... a bloody interesting fellow.’[89]
The work of both Glover and Mulgan therefore evidences an
idealisation of the settler myth and dependence on archetypes of the colonial
age as ‘better men’ than the current.
They are adventurers, prospectors, pioneers, sailors and rural labourers
who represent a pastoral idyll in frontier New Zealand. As such they demonstrate a continuation of
tropes used in the earlier literature of authors such as Alan Mulgan, which
display a romantic and sentimental view of colonial endeavor. A postcolonial reading of these characters
further identifies their cupidity for land, appetite for exploitation, dispossession
of the Maori and rejection of women.
Mein Smith argues that in this Arcadian myth ‘... scholars have
detected the individualism in nineteenth century Pakeha culture that reoccured
[in the 20th century] as a political emphasis on self reliance.’[90] The colonial paladins Glover and Mulgan
venerate are therefore ennobled for their independence, manliness, self
sufficiency, and in Mulgan’s case, for the selflessness and compassion they
show Johnson. This community between
men, Sargeson argues, is ‘a mark of colonial literature; a typical pattern of
masculine escape from an oppressive society to a remote and idyllic hollow.[91]
This masculine community, Jensen suggests, is the key feature of the
‘man alone’ in New Zealand literature, where regardless of whether this man was
a ‘solitary man, two men in a friendly relationship, or a large group of men’
the motif reflects the writer’s interest in
masculine contexts.[92] But Mulgan’s interpretation of manhood in Man Alone is complex and suggests that
‘there’s an element of deception, of play acting, to masculinity.’[93] For example, Johnson hears other passengers
on a train talking excitedly about the unemployed riots in Auckland.
They talked as if
they were going into a war area.
Listening, he considered the necessity
which all men have of dramatising themselves.[94]
Jensen concludes that ‘such passages suggest that our past male
writers were at least aware that masculinity was more than a straightforward
correlation of image and private self.’[95] Likewise, for all his earlier misogyny,
Glover in his later years resorted to writing volumes of highly sophisticated,
romantic love poetry for a woman who spurned his advances, and came to regard
New Zealand’s socially progressive poets and writers in the generations that
followed him as ‘talentless,’ as Thomson notes; ‘he ha[d] little time for the
verse of younger writers in whom he [could] discern no technical competence at
all.’[96]
In a last attempt to express his experience of the sea, he wrote Off Akaroa - Winter in 1962, aping the
‘half-line prosody, and even the mood, of the Old English poem The Seafarer.’[97] The ‘new’ poetic voice of New Zealand
was waning and by 1960, Jensen notes, ‘... John Mulgan’s and Frank Sargeson’s
‘man alone’ mode of fiction had developed from fresh excitement to a rather
faded institution.’[98]
It was, what Moffat terms, a ‘deeply ingrained myth’[99] of masculine literary
identity that had been enforced, rather than embraced, and had been enshrined
through repetition rather than agreement.
As Hilliard argues, the ‘hard judgements’ of Glover and Allen Curnow
were far from universally accepted by the new poets of the 1940s and 50s, ‘...
but it was Curnow’s judgements... that new writers had to reckon with.’[100]
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I was fascinated by the seals, penguins and later in the season, the Killer whales.
With the arrival of field parties, I traveled by C 130 to interesting places such as the Robert Scott Glacier, about 100 miles from the South Pole.
I spent a lot of time with Chris Knot our dog handler, and used to drive the second team. here are my two lead dogs, Mike and Kulak.
Chris would drive one team, and I the other, and we often did big trips to places like Cape Royds, 30 km away.
Sir Ernest Shackelton's hut at Cape Royds, base for his 1909 South Pole Expedition. 
Penguins at Cape Royds
Here I saw my first penguin, first seal and first ice-breaker. At just 21 years of age I found this so exciting.
Looking towards the Upper Wright Glacier and ice which flows from the polar plateau.
Mount Boreas in the Upper Wright Valley. Gary Lewis with his trusty Mountain Mule pack.
Our laboratory at Vanda Station where our electricity came from wind generation.
We had this strange outdoor toilet with Tony Bromley giving a demonstration. We used it all winter long, even when temperatures dropped to -45 degrees Centigrade.
