Reading the Maps

Cricket, peanuts and right-wing politics

2012-01-31T15:14:00.037+13:00

The recent post here about Rodney Hogg prompted some interesting comments box reflections on the often difficult relationship between cricketers and politics.

Hoggy may regret his recent intervention in Australian political discourse, but up in Queensland his former team mate Carl Rackemann is busy turning himself into a politician. Nicknamed 'Big Carl' by his fans, Rackemann played twelve tests and fifty-two one day internationals for Australia in the 1980s and '90s, before following family tradition and setting up as a peanut farmer in the South Burnett region.

Last September Rackemann announced that he would be standing as a candidate for the Katter Australian Party in the 2012 election to Queensland's state parliament. As its name suggests, Big Carl's party is led by Bob Katter, the long-time federal MP for the North Queensland seat of Kennedy. Katter is fond of wearing a ten gallon hat, and political analyst David Penbarthy has noted his 'strange, Alabama-inspired manner of speech'. Katter's politics are a curious mixture of libertarianism, social conservatism, and Keynesianism. He rails against 'government interference' in the lives of 'ordinary Australians', denouncing environmental laws in particular, but believes that the state should reimpose heavy tariffs on trade goods from Asia, subsidise farmers, and ban 'immoral' behaviour.

Katter's party has been described as 'One Nation with a hat', and it has been attempting to appeal to the small farmers and small town working class voters who supported Pauline Hanson in the 1990s. Many of these voters blame the decline of small town industries and falling prices for agricultural products on the globalisation of the Australian economy and the depredations of Asian capitalists. They may be alienated by the Liberal-National coalition's embrace of globalisation, but they are also hostile to the 'political correctness' of the Labor and Green parties.

Katter can appeal just as crudely as Hanson to the prejudices of Australians. In a 1996 speech he accused unnamed 'slanty-eyed ideologues' of trying to impose 'political correctness' on his country; more recently he has called the construction of one hundred new military vessels to patrol the waters around Australia and hunt down would-be refugees.

In his recent interviews with the media, Carl Rackemann has explained that he is a third-generation farmer in South Burnett, and has claimed that this firm grounding in the region will help him to perform well if he gets to parliament. What Big Carl hasn't mentioned is that South Burnett is perhaps the most reactionary part of Australia, and that members of the extended Rackemann family have been closely involved in the febrile, anti-democratic politics of the place.

In the late nineteenth century the South Burnett area was a part of the blackbirding industry, as Melanesians abductees landed in ports like Mackay and Brisbane were purchased and put to work on cattle farms and sugar plantations. As Queensland's slave-driven economy took off in the 1870s and '80s, the state earned the nickname 'the second Louisiana', and attracted emigrants from the defeated Confederate States of America. Germans also began to arrive in numbers, and in 1884 George Hiedrich Rackemann led a large family group off the docks in Brisbane.

In the area around the South Burnett town of Kingaroy, the Rackemanns helped establish a peanut industry in the 1920s. When the Great Depression struck Australia's rural economy, depriving farmers of export markets and pushing them into debt, many of the people of South Burnett turned to the ideology of the far right for answers. Hundreds joined the Douglas Credit Party, which blamed the Depression on a conspiracy by Jewish bankers, and warned of the dangers of a takeover of Australia by communists.

In August 1939 thirty-seven armed supporters of the Douglas Credit Party stormed the Queensland parliament in Brisbane, and took the state's Labor MPs hostage. The rebels, who surrendered after a short siege, included Charles and Raymond Rackemann, peanut farmers from South Burnett. The Douglas Credit Party petered out in the early 1940s, but later that decade many of its activists formed the League of Rights, which was for decades Australia's largest explicitly anti-semitic organisation. With its claims that Jews, bankers, Aboriginals, and trade unionists were plotting to ruin white farmers and nationalise their land, the League played on old financial and racial anxieties.

One of the League of Rights' admirers was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was MP for Nanango, a seat that includes parts of South Burnett, for forty years, and Premier of Queensland for eighteen years. As Premier, Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency to allow the passage of the Springbok rugby team through Queensland, banned trade union pickets, and regularly accused the United Nations of plotting to conquer Australia. Bjelke-Petersen may have repressed the left and trade unions during his long reign as Premier, but he was consistently supportive of far right political organisations. He was happy to speak at League of Rights events, and his paranoid denunciations of communism and the United Nations encouraged the formation of ultra-right outfits like the Progress Party, which contested Queensland's 1980 election, and the Confederate Action Party, which grew in strength in the 1980s before falling apart in the early '90s. Paul Rackemann contested the Capricornia seat in the 1980 election for the Progress Party, and was a founding member of the Confederate Action Party. In his speeches and communications to the media, Rackemann claimed that he had been persecuted on account of his German ancestry, denounced the Australian banking system as the tool of a sinister cabal of conspirators, and complained that Queenslanders were becoming 'serfs'.

In the 1990s another member of the Rackemann clan became prominent in far right political circles. After becoming interested in German history because of his family's links to the country, Peter Rackemann decided that the Holocaust had never happened, and that Hitler's regime had been unfairly maligned by historians. Rackemann became an activist for the Adelaide Institute, the organisation led by Frederick Toben, one of the world's most notorious Holocaust deniers and Hitlerians. Rackemann remains one of the key members of the Institute, and the group's website describes him as a man 'who is willing to die' in the struggle to clear Hitler's name. In the January 2007 issue of the Adelaide Institute's newsletter Toben celebrated the involvement of Peter Rackemann's father in the 'pineapple rebellion' of 1939.

Carl Rackemann will be trying to win Joh Bjelke-Petersen's old seat of Nanango in the upcoming Queensland federal election. It would be unfair to conclude, without the help of evidence, that Rackemann has the same politics as some of his relatives, or that he aims to perpetuate the legacy of Bjelke-Petersen and the League of Rights, but there is surely something rather disingenuous in his claims that his family history and his South Burnett upbringing give him an affinity with democracy.

[Posted By Maps/Scott]

Laughing at Hoggy

2012-01-27T21:08:00.029+13:00

When I saw the name Rodney Hogg in a news headline yesterday, something stirred in the reptilian antechamber of my brain, that place where obsolete information and primordial memories are stored.

Hogg is in trouble after announcing on twitter that he had raised the Aussie flag to celebrate Australia Day, and then written 'Allah is a shit' on it, to make sure that 'it would offend Muslims'. After both Muslims and non-Muslims took offence, Hogg got himself in worse strife by insisting that his remark was an attempt at 'Aussie humour'.

Hogg nowadays apparently makes a living as an after dinner speaker, but back in the summer of 1982/83, when I was staying in Victoria and being introduced by relatives there to the great game of cricket, he opened the Australian bowling attack alongside Dennis Lillee.

For me, and for the Kiwi batsmen who had to face him that summer, Lillee was a scary guy. With his mean smile, his thick and inflexible moustache, and the gold crucifix which dangled over his hairy chest, Lillee resembled one of Al Pacino's sidekicks in Scarface or Carlito's Way. His run-up seemed endless, until he finally reached the bowling crease and used a high, dramatic action to send the ball jagging out of the pitch and into the ribs of John Wright or Bruce Edgar. My Aussie relatives were a jingoistic lot, but even some of them were hostile to Lillee. I remember an elderly Aunt calling the great fast bowler a "thug", and then recalling how he had kicked Javed Miandad in 1981, after the unfortunate Pakistani batsman got in his way while taking a run. An enraged Miandad started to swing his bat at Lillee, as if it were a club. Undeterred by his lack of weaponry, Lillee grinned and put his dukes up, and it was only the intervention of an umpire which stopped the scrap. I was too cowed by Lillee to express open animosity towards him, even from the apparent safety of the living room in my grandmother's house, where I would sit watching day after day of cricket. I did, however, enjoy mocking Rodney Hogg, a bowler who had all of Lillee's aggression but none of his gravitas. Where Lillee was tall and tanned with flowing dark hair, 'Hoggy' was squat and pink-skinned, with a ridiculous crop of light ginger hair. Whenever Hogg was irritated - and he was irritated often - his skin would become pinker still, and his sunburnt ears would seem to swell. After Lance Cairns hit him for successive sixes, during a legendary innings in the second final of 1982/83 World Series Cup, Hogg was so full of colour that he resembled an enormous lobster. If Lillee's anger was terrifying, Hogg's was amusing.

Hogg's most famous clash with a bastman is featured in Fire in Babylon, the acclaimed 2010 documentary about the politically motivated, all-conquering West Indian cricket team of the late 1970s and '80s. During the Windies' 1979/80 tour of Australia, Hogg decided to try to transfer their star batsman Viv Richards from the cricket field to hospital. With his Rastafarian wrist bands, his super-aggressive batting style, and his refusal to bring any protective gear except a floppy cap and a piece of chewing gum to the crease, Richards was, in the opinion of Hogg and his Aussie team mates, a cheeky darkie overdue for a fall. Hogg began to pepper Richards with bouncers, and in the second test of the series he got a ball to fly off a dodgy Melbourne pitch into Richards' face, which was, as usual, unprotected by a helmet. Richards took the blow on the mouth, straightened up and faced Hogg, and spat a bloody tooth onto the pitch. Hogg returned to his mark and, with a massive boozed-up crowd chanting his name, ran in and bowled another bouncer at Richards. Instead of stepping aside or ducking the delivery, the great batsman hooked it into the stand for six. As Hoggy stood in the middle of the pitch and watched the ball disappear, he seemed to get pinker by the second. Richards continued smashing Hogg, until the bowler limped off the Melbourne Cricket Ground with figures off none for fifty-nine from six overs and a ripped muscle. He didn't play test cricket again for a year.

Hogg liked to serve up bouncers, but when he batted he struggled to cope with the inevitable retaliation from opposing fast bowlers. Richard Hadlee was able to bowl bouncers without varying his action or expending any extra effort, and unlike Lillee and Hogg he chose to use the delivery only sparingly. Hadlee's subtle approach to the bouncer made him especially dangerous, and in the middle of that long hot summer of 1982/83 he struck Hogg, who was not wearing a helmet, on the side of the head. As blood poured out of one of his ridiculous swollen ears and the Aussie commentators fulminated hypocritically about dangerous bowling, Hogg was escorted from the field.

After being sconed by Hadlee, Hoggy the batsman seemed preoccupied with spotting and avoiding bouncers. Sometimes he even treated yorkers - balls aimed at the sandshoes rather than the head - as if they were bouncers, as this bizarre dismissal to Viv Richards' team mate Michael Holding shows:

Retirement seems to change the personalities of some cricketers - who would have guessed that Ian Chappell, the ruthless Aussie captain who threw Lillee at cowering enemies during the 1970s, would become a critic, on humanitarian grounds, of the Howard government's treatment of refugees, or that Chris Lewis, the teetotalling English allrounder, would turn into a drug smuggler? - but it doesn't appear to have changed Hogg. He was buffoon on the field thirty years ago, and he's a buffoon off the field now. Keep the laughs coming, Hoggy.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Tapu, pigs, and power: talking about Tongan Ark

2012-01-25T04:20:00.036+13:00

[When Paul Janman previewed his Tongan Ark in the Auckland Film Archive's cramped theatre before Christmas, the audience consisted mostly of Tongan intellectuals and members of the New Zealand film industry. I was keen to show the Ark to a few of my literary mates, so I coaxed Paul around to my place, where he rigged up a giant screen on the lounge room wall. After the last reel I caught a few members of the audience on tape, as they reached for beers and steaks and discussed some of the ideas in Paul's film. Here's a transcript...]

Ted Jenner: Could you tell me more, Paul, about the background to the scenes of rioting and streetfighting in your film? The burning and the looting...

Paul Janman: I shot that footage on the 16th of November 2006, during the riot which destroyed much of downtown Nuku'alofa. The riot began as a peaceful demonstration for greater democracy in Tonga. Commoners, who make up almost all of the population of the country, were tired of seeing nobles dominating parliament, and the king choosing the country's Prime Minister. Pro-democracy politicians like 'Akilisi Pohiva were demanding the reform of the constitution, so that commoners elected the majority of seats in parliament, and so that the king became a merely symbolic leader...

The Tongan monarchy, rather like the Thai monarchy, has traditionally been a symbol of independence from the West. It was created, in its modern form, partly because Tongans realised, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that if they did not have a strong central government then they would be colonised. Many Tongans consider that the monarchy saved them from losing their land and their culture to Europeans. But the institution has now, in the eyes of many, become a problem. The royal family and the nobles are often accused of corruption - they are particularly notorious for using their control of the state to get rich running monopolistic and inefficient businesses.

The 2006 protest may have begun peacefully, but it turned into a sort of violent party. The protesters stole all the liquor from the duty free shops and expatriates' clubs around Nukua'lofa. And once some of the liquor had been drunk, someone had the bright idea of burning the town down... Scott: But the destruction wasn't indiscriminate, was it? Certain businesses were targeted - those associated with the royal family, and also those owned by Chinese...

Paul: And then, funnily enough, the Chinese government stepped in and funded the reconstruction of central Nuku'alofa! There are building sites full of Chinese workmen. China is making a big effort to strengthen economic ties with South Pacific nations, and I notice that the rebuilding programme isn't an act of charity - it's actually a sort of loan to the Tongan government...how Tonga will be able to repay the debt I don't know -

Jack Ross: In a sense you can't win, can you? You topple a traditional oligarchy, a homegrown oligarchy, and then you get an international oligarchy, and what chance do you have of influencing them, when you're a small country so far from head office? Once you've got the Coca Cola company or its equivalent calling the shots, it's very hard to influence them.

Scott: I do think that the system which has existed in Tonga for the last century and a half - the system centred on the modern monarchy - has survived for so long because it has some positive qualities. The constitution created by the first modern Tongan king prevented the sale of land to foreigners and guaranteed each male citizen a livelihood. King Tupou the first was trying to find a way to balance Western modernity and Tongan tradition. He had travelled to Australia and seen the poverty of the working class there, and he knew about the dispossession of the Waikato people in New Zealand. And I think that Futa Helu, in a way, tried to perform the same balancing act when he built up 'Atenisi University. He wanted to fuse Western and Polynesian ideas. He wanted a marriage of equals.

Paul: Futa was often referred to as the alternative king of Tonga. That gives you an idea of the mana he had in Tongan society. He was in some ways more respected than the real king. He was penniless for most of his life, like Socrates, but he had a subterranean influence on Tongans. People would attack him in public but seek his advice in private. The royal family sometimes sought his advice when it was planning public events like weddings or coronations, because he had such a profound knowledge of Tongan culture, Tongan genealogy, Tongan etiquette. 'Atenisi was at times persecuted by the government, but it was never shut down, because the king knew that it had a level of public support - he knew that a thousand people would descend on the campus and protest... The present king of Tonga is a very educated man, an even more educated man than his father - he went to exclusive schools, he knows several European languages, he's very cosmopolitan - and he gets bored in Tonga. He used to send a black London taxicab down to Futa's house -the king likes those big black cabs because you can wear a sword and travel comfortably in them - and the car would bring Futa up to one of the royal residences. The king and Futa would drink all night, then the big black cab would head back to 'Atenisi, and Futa would roll out...
Scott: Futa was quite a carpenter, wasn't he? The title of your film alludes to the fact that he quite literally built 'Atenisi himself, after travelling to 'Eua and harvesting some trees -

Echo Zena-Janman: Not only did Futa build the school - he built the ground the school stands on. In the early '60s it was swamp, and so Futa and his followers had to lay shells and gravel, before they could build...the ground around the school is still swampy, and certain buildings - the library, for instance - seem almost encircled by water. That's not good for the books, of course...

Richard Taylor: I liked how laidback Futa and the other educators at 'Atenisi seemed in the film. They seemed able to laugh at anything...

Paul: Futa was very laidback. He got Harvard-trained classicists to work for a bag of taro a week. He had a laidback charm. He wasn't interested, for a long time, in keeping records or having curricula. He could be a fatalist. Sometimes he seemed to accept that the school he had established would die. He had a long view of history - he knew, like his hero Heraclitus, that nothing was eternal -

Ted: But Heraclitus isn't necessarily a fatalist. Heraclitus emphasised renewal as well as destruction -

Paul: In a sense 'Atenisi has perpetuated itself, has renewed itself, by sending its graduates into universities and other institutions around the world. In New Zealand graduates like 'Okusi Mahina and Opeti Taliai - and I could mention many other names - have made their mark. Even though the institution is struggling, to say the least, in Tonga, it is renewing itself as part of the Tongan diaspora...

Ted: I've spent my life teaching and translating the Greeks, so you won't be surprised that I find it extraordinary and inspiring to learn that 'Atenisi was teaching Greek for decades - from the late 1970s, in fact, until recently. In the same period New Zealand schools stopped offering Greek to their students. What an achievement, for a poor school in a tiny nation to be teaching Heraclitus and other Greek thinkers in ancient Greek!

Scott: And yet there seem to be some Tongans who consider that Futa took too reverential an attitude towards the Western intellectual tradition, and too critical an attitude towards Tongan culture and thought. The poet Konai Helu Thaman, for instance, seems to consider that Futa was too dismissive of Tongan tradition, and in the discussion that followed the first preview of Paul's film Okusi Mahina criticised Futa Helu's interpretation of tapu.

'Okusi argued that Helu and some of his followers - I think he was referring to Opeti Taliai and Michael Horowitz - treated tapu, treated the system of prohibitions and distinctions we refer to using the word tapu, as nothing but a means for chiefs to control commoners in traditional Tongan society. But 'Okusi argued, if I understood him rightly, that tapu was much more than this - that it was a way of dividing up the world, and that it was rooted in the very language Tongans use. It was a foundation of the Tongan world.

'Okusi seemed to think that the critics of tapu - those who would condemn it as irredeemably irrational - had their own, unacknowledged ways of arbitrarily dividing the world up - their own tapu, in other words. They were pretending to sit on a mountaintop, above all irrationality, but were missing the biases that the European intellectual tradition gave them -

Jack: But it's like the argument about Christianity in general, or about religion in general. People used to criticise Gibbon for his depiction of the early Christians, the Christians of the Roman Empire, as a bunch of ignorant hairy fanatics destroying everything in their path - they said you've just missed the whole point, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the fact that God was guiding them. Gibbon said "I don't see any God - I just see a bunch of hairy fanatics: what do you expect me to write?"

So finally when you're describing a system which clearly works in favour of the ruling class, which benefits the powerful, who cares how aesthetically beautiful some of the expressions of that system are, or how spiritualised they are? Who cares how wonderful church music or architecture are? At the end of the day power systems tend to legitimise themselves in aesthetic forms, and to gradually entrench themselves in people's hearts and souls, and then they become very difficult to dislodge. But you've got to combat them. I think it's good if the film's offended some people - you don't want to try to please everyone.

Paul: I was worried about my position as a palangi observer of a Tongan institution. I tried not to make a black and white film - I wanted to present what I saw as a series of paradoxes in 'Atenisi life, and in Tongan life. The film isn't supposed to proceed in a linear manner. Themes are touched on, put aside, then picked up later.

Richard: There seem to be points where an argument is introduced overtly - when it comes straight out of someone's mouth - and then is carried on covertly, through images. I noticed somebody talking about Heraclitus, and his notion of flux, before the focus of discussion moved to another subject. Even as the overt subject of the film shifted, though, a series of images of the sea swelling and breaking were shown. I saw these images as allusions to, or illustrations of, Heraclitus' notion of flux and flow. The film seemed to be working on multiple levels.

And the film gave me an overwhelming feeling of strangeness, especially in its early stages. I felt the alieness of Tonga -

Paul: It exists in a different time and space. The very fact that people find it possible, in Tonga, to sit back and think about Heraclitus for days on end, to sit around the kava bowl and philosophise at such length - this is something that impressed me when I spent two years teaching at 'Atenisi. The methods of teaching there were partly determined by the plentiful supply of time, and by the porous nature of the boundaries between work and leisure.

Ted: What were you teaching at 'Atenisi?

Paul: I gave a course in world literature. I'd begin with the Greeks, with Aristophanes and other dramatists, then work through Don Quixote, and Moby Dick, I did the Romantic poets, Tagore, a lot of Joyce -

Scott: What was Futa Helu's teaching style like?

Paul: He never read lectures. He improvised. He did often have lists of dates - lists that began in pre-Socratic times, and went through to the present. He had a very informal way of teaching, and an informal, sometimes eccentric way of mentoring his staff. I remember when one teacher arrived at the school, from the United States - Futa left a note for her that said 'Welcome -we here in Tonga think that blacks are too black, and whites are too white, whereas we are a mellow shade of brown. Tell that to the American racists!' That was Futa's idea of course notes...

Richard: I liked the pigs in the film! They're everywhere!

Scott: Tongan pigs roam down roads and through backyards, but everyone seems to know who owns which pig...

Paul: In a way, that could be a metaphor for Tongan society. On the surface it appears casual, even chaotic, but there is a pattern, there are rules, rules which are at first hidden to outsiders...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Ballooning, and other acts of defiance

2012-01-19T18:47:00.071+13:00

New Zealanders were surprised as well as upset by the recent deaths of eleven balloonists in the Wairarapa. We have gotten used to thinking about ballooning as a safe, even restful pursuit. In recent decades ballooning companies have insinuated their way into our tourism industry, and in regions like the Wairarapa and the Waikato balloon-themed festivals draw tens of thousands of visitors annually. With their silent flight and prettily patterned colours, balloons seem to augment rather than damage the scenic qualities of our countryside.

But ballooning has not always been seen, either in New Zealand or overseas, as a bucolic pastime. Like the train and the iron smelt, the balloon was once a symbol of the industrial revolution and of modernity. The balloon was invented in pre-revolutionary France, but it became famous in the nineteenth century. Meteorologists and physicists sent unmanned balloons higher and higher, as scientific revolution spread from industrial Britain through Western Europe and North America. Cartographers found the view from a balloon basket helpful, as they worked to replace the serpent-filled seas and impregnable mountain walls of whimsical pre-Enlightenment mapmakers with geometric grids. Explorers landed balloons on Arctic bergs and African dunes.

During the American Civil War the Confederate and Union armies used balloons to spy on each other, and in 1871 the Communards of Paris defied the bourgeois armies besieging their city by sending out a balloon-load of propagandists for their cause.

By the first decade of the twentieth century Germany's fleet of cigar-shaped Zeppelin airships could move luxury goods and luxury-craving passengers between European cities; a few years later, as the continent's capitalist class embarked on a civil war, the Zeppelins were adapted to deliver bombs.

Although New Zealand saw its first flight in 1889, ballooning only really arrived here in 1894, when a young American aeronaut named Leila Adair travelled the length of the country, making a series of spectacular ascents in cities and small towns alike.

Billed as the 'Aerial Queen' and 'the only living lady aeronaut' by her brother and manager Arthur, Adair tended to launch her performances from a park or square which had been commandeered for the occasion. After paying a fee, eager locals were invited to help in the drawn-out business of inflating her vehicle. They would help dig a low trench and light a fire there, then watch as the resulting channel of hot air flowed into the converted water tank attached to Adair's balloon, mixing with gas and slowly inflating the thick folds of canvas that lay on the ground.

Once her craft was ready for its journey, the slim, blonde Adair would appear in a blue costume that resembled a bathing suit, balance on the trapeze bars that hung instead of a basket beneath her balloon, and make her ascent, waving and blowing kisses to the crowd below. When she had risen a thousand feet or more into the air, Adair was able to leap from her perch and open a primitive parachute attached to her wrist. Her balloon was supposed to follow her down once it ran out of hot air. But Adair's flights seldom went to plan. In Auckland she was carried by a northerly wind over the harbour, and was eventually forced to leap into the Rangitoto Channel, where a convenient steamer rescued her. After taking off a few days later in the little spa town of Te Aroha, she floated over the Kaimai Ranges and landed in distant Waihi. In Hamilton her balloon began to tear and spew smoke, so that she had to crash land. Adair's luck was no better in the South Island. In Christchurch she was taken to hospital with head wounds, after colliding with a wire clothesline, and on the West Coast she visited another hospital, after knocking herself unconscious during a landing. From January to November 1894, Leila Adair's adventures were constantly reported in the country's newspapers. Thousands paid to watch her launch her strange craft, and many more followed her erratic flights on horseback and in buggies. Through the propaganda of the deed, Adair almost single-handedly introduced aviation to New Zealanders.

Yet 'the Aerial Queen' is little remembered by New Zealanders. She appears in Sandra Coney's book Stroppy Sheilas and Gutsy Girls, and a trapeze artist parachuted to the earth in her honour at the Balloons Over Wairarapa festival in 2008. But Adair's feats go unmentioned in most histories of New Zealand aviation, and no statue or plaque memorialises her.

We can perhaps see the beginning of this indifference even in 1894, amidst the enthusiasm caused by Adair's tour of the country. Although some of the newspaper accounts of Adair's flights are admiring, a number are surprisingly hostile. Adair was repeatedly characterised as arrogant rather than courageous, and avaricious rather than enterprising. Her misfortunes were criticised, and her achievements ignored. The crowds that gathered for Adair's performances sometimes seemed, like Romans at the Colosseum or Victorian Britons at an open-air hanging, to be excited by the prospect of witnessing death. Hostility to 'the only living lady aeronaut' grew so pronounced that Arthur Adair was moved, in the middle of 1894, to write a letter to the Nelson-based paper The Colonist to defend his sister's 'honor and sense of justice'.

To understand the hostility towards Adair in 1894 we have to understand the peculiar consciousness of fin de siecle white New Zealanders. The settlers who descended on these islands in such numbers in the nineteenth century were often economic and spiritual refugees from an Old World in the throes of industrialisation and modernisation. As James Belich has shown in his book Making Peoples, these refugees were drawn to New Zealand by the promise of a 'better Britain', a sort of yeoman's paradise where land was plentiful and cheap and the dark satanic mills of the old country were absent.

Yet the society Pakeha established on the ground they had conquered from Maori was in many ways ruthlessly modern. An efficient modern state was built; agriculture was rationalised, as the customary land taken from Maori was splintered into individually titled plots; railways were laid; and towns and cities burgeoned. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the modernity of New Zealand society contrasted strangely with the consciousness of most Pakeha. The same men and women who had, in the space of a few calamitous decades, brought capitalism and a modern state to these islands imagined themselves as the inhabitants of a ruritarian paradise, a place uncorrupted by the innovations and problems of industrial Europe. The fin de siecle craze for pretty paintings of local landscapes, the proliferation of romantic novels set in an idealised and infantilised Maori past, and the coining of sentimental self-descriptions like 'God's Own Country' and 'Maoriland' were all expressions of the false consciousness of Pakeha.

Fin de siecle Pakeha had a fear of Germany and the United States, newly industrialised powers which were contesting the hegemony of the British Empire in the Pacific. Newspaper columnists and cartoonists frequently portrayed the United States as a brashly expansionist nation which lacked both the civilised culture of Britain and the egalitarian ethos of 'God's Own Country'. The frequent visits of American naval vessels to this country's ports had made Pakeha aware of the wealth and technological sophistication of 'the Yanks', and Washington's colonisation of the eastern parts of Samoa infuriated Kiwi politicians.

For many Pakeha New Zealanders, the confident ascents Leila Adair made in 1894 using her new-fangled technology seem to have symbolised the vulgarity and ambition of modern America. Ballooning itself quickly came to represent, for large numbers of Pakeha, some of the more frighening features of modernity. Ballons and airships were mysterious foreign inventions which seemed impervious to earthbound authority.

For a couple of months in 1909, misgivings about balloooning created a peculiar popular delusion. In July and August of that year, thousands of New Zealanders saw large, apparently sophisticated airships moving speedily through their skies. Early in July the Tuapeka Times reported that a huge airship 'with propellors' had passed within 'a hundred yards' of a house in Otago Blue Mountains district. The six people who saw the craft were unsure whether it was 'of New Zealand or German origin'. At about the same time, 'mysterious lights' were seen in the sky above Alexandria, and attributed to an airship. Parties of armed men marched into the backblocks of the South Island, after hearing rumours of wrecked ships and German bodies. One man claimed to have discovered an airship refuelling depot, after he came across a couple of cans of petrol on an isolated hill.

At first North Island newspapers joked that sightings of airships were products of the whiskey stills operating in the backcountry of the South Island, but by the second week of August the Evening Post had to admit that 'hot-air ships, cigar-shaped and otherwise' were being seen 'in various parts of the Wellington and Taranaki districts'. Soon the mysterious ships were also being spotted in the skies of Eastland, Auckland, and the Kaipara District.

Some commentators suggested that the airships were the work of a secretive local inventor, but most blamed them on a foreign power. A German yacht named the Seestern had vanished off the coast of Queensland shortly before the airship sightings began, and had been declared lost after a search by an Australian warship. Many Kiwis decided that the Seestern had secretly crossed the Tasman and begun to launch airships, with the aim of gathering intelligence that might be used to plan an invasion of New Zealand.

A few New Zealanders blamed the airships on the Martians, a race known, since the publication of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds a few years earlier, to be quite as martial and expansionist as the Hun.

Even newspapers which declined to take the airship sightings seriously could use them as an occasion for warnings about the evils of modernity and the threat posed by foreign powers. In an editorial published in mid-August 1909, for instance, the Catholic Tablet ridiculed the 'panic' about Zeppelins, but attributed the phenomenon to the way that, in the modern, industrial world, powerful nations 'swarmed over their racial and national boundaries'. After World War One the airship was quickly superseded by the aeroplane. Rather like the train, the balloon gradually ceased to be a symbol of modernity, and began to interest nostalgics, preservationists, and tourism boards. Leila Adair went unhonoured here in the 1890s and early twentieth century because she represented a sinister, foreign innovation; she goes unhonoured today because the bewildering novelty of her ascents is hard to imagine.

One of the very few New Zealand writers to have noticed Leila Adair is Kendrick Smithyman, who used a poem in his 1979 collection Dwarf with a Billiard Cue to describe her near-disastrous visit to Hamilton. In 'Lament, for a North Island Land Association' Smithyman views Adair's Hamilton performance against the backdrop of the city's early history. Hamilton was founded in 1864, after British and colonial forces had defeated King Tawhiao's army in a series of battles, and driven most Waikato Maori into exile in the central North Island. Many of the city's earliest inhabitants were soldiers who had been rewarded for their service with plots of flood-prone land. Hamilton was located far from markets, divided by the Waikato River, and threatened by Tawhiao's forces, which maintained pa a few miles south of the town, on the far side of the Puniu River.

In the early parts of his poem Smithyman considers the Land Associations, conclaves of property speculators which often bought up territory abandoned by disillusioned ex-soldiers and sold it on, with the help of overcharged propaganda, to new and hopeful settlers. In their prospectuses and newspaper advertisments the Land Associations commonly used sexual imagery to describe the Waikato and similar regions. Would-be farmers were urged to take possession of 'virgin' and 'fertile' lands, so that they might plant their seeds there.

Smithyman mocks the 'fecund' vocabulary of the Land Association propagandists. Noting the miseries of the early Pakeha settlers of the Waikato, he claims that, far from conquering the region, these settlers 'became hers'. Floods, droughts, erosion, and Maori raiding parties were all, according to Smithyman, 'gestures' intended to show that 'she was not wholly knuckled/ under'.

Later in his poem Smithyman describes the efforts of those agents of boantical and zoological imperialism, acclimatisation societies, to introduce pigeons into the Waikato. The birds were supposed to provide shooting practice for Pakeha soldier-settlers and militiamen, who had had, since the end of the war, no 'nigs/ suitable for targetting'. To the frustration of acclimatisers and marksmen alike, though, the pigeons 'would not rise' into the skies of the Waikato. Smithyman sees the failure of the birds to acclimatise as another sign of the land's resistance.

Only in the last section of his poem does Smithyman turn to Leila Adair. He imagines her 'speeding and swaying' on her trapeze, as an 'updraft' lifts her high above Hamilton. Adair seems to be defying the land which has frustrated so many newcomers, but just as she has 'kissed her hand to the earth-bound' her balloon begins to 'hiss...serpentine volleying smoke'. Adair parachutes, and lands safety in a gorse bush. The land, Smithyman concludes, is 'not to be defied'. 'Lament, for a North Island Land Association' is only one of scores of poems Smithyman wrote about flight and its consequences. After being conscripted into the army in 1941 the poet requested a transfer to the Air Force, in the hope of becoming a fighter pilot. Smithyman eventually found himself serving as a storeman at Air Force bases, where he witnessed several fatal plane crashes and developed a dread of flying.

In postwar poems like 'Aircrash in Antarctica' and the famous 'Flying to Palmerston', Smithyman suggests that human flight can be a hubristic, and therefore dangerous enterprise, and makes it into a symbol of the excesses of industrial society. Like fin de siecle Pakeha before him, Smithyman thinks that Adair's confidence in the new science of aeronautics was misguided. But where many fin de siecle Pakeha, in their self-delusion, imagined that Adair and other aeronauts were the harbingers of of an alien modernity, Smithyman recognises that aviation complemented rather than conflicted with the society Pakeha had established in the second half of the ninteeenth century. Adair's attempt to 'defy' the land is no more hubristic than the Pakeha attempts to transform and exploit the territory they have conquered in the Waikato and elsewhere. Her balloon is not more outrageous, and a good deal more elegant, than their surveyors' maps and drainage pumps and phosphate fertiliser.

Last week I found myself in Hamilton, and decided to visit the scene of Leila Adair's forgotten ascent. Although Hamilton's central business district and government are located on the western bank of the Waikato, many of the city's earliest inhabitants raised homes in the east, where a grid of streets was laid out around a square of slightly raised land where Maori travellers had traditionally camped. With their resolutely straight lines and their names, which celebrated explorers like Cook, governors like George Grey, colonial fighters like Von Tempsky, and 'friendly' Maori leaders like Robert Naylor, the streets of the east were part of an attempt to impose a new symbolic order on the Waikato. But the streets were soon filled with mud, and most of the families who lived in them were Irish Catholics at odds with the Anglican establishment on the other side of the river. Sydney Square, which is nowadays known as Steele Park, was the social centre of the fledgling suburb of Hamilton East. On weekdays an open-air market operated on the Square's grass, and on Saturdays the space hosted games of rugby or cricket and running races. Processions began and ended in the Square, and couples walked there in the summer evenings.

In 1874 the Society of Oddfellows, a British-based working class 'mutual assistance organisation' with its roots in the trade guilds of the Middle Ages, opened a lodge hall on the corner of Cook and Grey streets, near the northwestern edge of Sydney Square. Funded by Thomas Pearson, an unsuccessful gold miner who had drifted to Hamilton and discovered that soap could be made out of the sand that lay there on the banks of the Waikato, the hall hosted fundraising dances, lectures on the ecology of the horse and the mechanics of railways, and, in 1885, a diorama which depicted, with the help of simulated gunfire and armies of toy soldiers, the British campaign against the Mahdi rebellion in Sudan. After being abandoned by the Oddfellows the hall became a corset factory; today it hosts the Cook Cafe and Bar. When I wandered in at half-past seven, after a long walk down River Road and Grey Street, out of Hamilton's new northern suburbs and into its old, green southeast, the bar's only other patrons were a young couple who were sharing a bottle of wine and encouraging their small boy to skid on his socks along the polished kauri floorboards that Pearson's soap had funded. Apart from a high mezzanine, which must once have been an ideal place to install dignitaries and choirs, there was no clue to the bar's former life.

I bought a beer and walked it to a small porch at the front of the old hall. Across the road in Steele Park a few kids were playing an intermittent game of touch rugby. The oak trees which encircle the park were planted in 1889, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Hamilton, by some of the 'surviving pioneers', some of whom must have only been middle-aged. I am always impressed by how quickly the impulse toward the commemoration and preservation of colonial history appeared in New Zealand. It is as though the very shallowness of European history on these islands prompted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formation of local history societies and the planting of trees and plaques.

As I finished my beer the two speakers that sat like blackbirds on the facade of the Cook began to play what sounded like a mashup of Lady Gaga and an Atari game theme tune from the 1980s. It was time to escape, so I walked to the squat wooden pavilion at the northern end of Steele Park. According to a report published in the New Zealand Herald and republished in the Taranaki Herald, it was in front of this building that Leila Adair launched her balloon on Saturday, March the 24th, 1894. As a crowd 'far larger than ever gathers for local sports' watched from Sydney Square and nearby streets, Adair rose 'gently' to an altitude of about three hundred feet, so that she 'seemed no bigger than a child' to earthbound observers.

I headed towards the southeast corner of the park, following Adair's trajectory. A couple of the kids stopped chasing the ball and looked at me, when I strayed over the touchline of the invisible rugby pitch they had made under one of the 1889 oaks. "Sorry" I said, pointing at the fragments of sky that showed through the leaves above our heads. "I'm looking for a balloon." They turned away and rejoined the chase.

Leila Adair had planned to drift a few kilometres east, into the raw farming country beyond the edge of Hamilton, then parachute to safety and wait for her balloon to follow her down. A group of Hamiltonians had set out from Sydney Square in carriages and on horseback to watch her descent. Before it had travelled the two hundred or so metres from one end of the Square to the other, though, Adair's balloon began to tear and smoke. As she drifted east out of the square and began to float east up Cook Street, losing height as she went, the tear spread steadily wider, until it stretched from the top to the bottom of her balloon's canvas skin. The Herald's anonymous reporter wondered whether the balloon 'would collapse in mid-air, or whether it would last until it reached to the ground'. He saw Adair clinging to her trapeze, and decided that, because she had not used her parachute, she 'evidently trusted' in the ability of her craft to get her safely to the ground. In truth, Adair would have had no choice except to hang tight: she was too close to the ground to use her parachute.

The balloon continued to drop, until it was hanging just a few feet above an open drain that flowed alongside Cook Street. Adair was able to leap out of her vehicle just before it crashed into a large mudhole at the end of the drain. The Herald's reporter judged her lucky:

It certainly was a narrow escape, for had the balloon lasted buoyant a few yards further and fallen into the water and collapsed while its occupant was still clinging to it, instead of on the top of the bank above the water-hole, she could not have got free and would have been smothered beneath the weight of the canvas in the pool of muddy water.

A 'rush of carriages and horsemen' arrived beside the mudhole, and Adair, who was, according to the Herald, 'considerably excited by her adventure', returned to Sydney Square's pavilion, where she addressed the crowd apologetically, 'expressing regret at the failure and hoping they would not think her a fraud'.

Smithyman's vision of Adair parachuting on a gorse bush, which he acknowledged finding in a book by HMN Norris about Hamilton's early history, is contradicted by the report that appeared in the New Zealand Herald and the Taranaki Herald. Did Morris, and perhaps also Smithyman, decide to dignify Adair's descent, by implying that it was controlled and safe, if finally rather uncomfortable?

I wandered up Cook Street, imagining Adair's wrinkled, ruined balloon wallowing like some grotesque elephant in the muddy water she avoided. I looked for traces of an open drain, but the road was tarred, and the pavement was smooth concrete.

It was unlikely, I realised, that many of the houses on present-day Cook Street were standing when Leila Adair came floating past. The year before Adair's flight Richard Seddon had begun what would be a long reign as Liberal Premier of New Zealand. In the second half of the 1890s Seddon's government started to offer low interest loans to help its middle class supporters buy homes, and this incentive along with the emergence of steam-powered saws and other advanced building technology encouraged a housing boom in Hamilton, where some residents had already benefited from a take-off in the Waikato economy caused by refrigerated shipping and large-scale drainage schemes.

Hamilton's population increased sevenfold between 1900 and 1916, and scores of fashionable villas were raised over the ruins of small cottages on Cook and adjacent streets. As the new century went on the villas, with their wraparound verandahs and bay windows, were superseded by simpler but cheaper bungalows, and in the 1940s Hamilton East became one of the testing grounds for the first Labour government's state housing programme, as a whole new suburb - Hayes Paddock, a collection of pleasantly winding streets beside the Waikato River - was given over to state houses.

Today villas and bungalows of Cook Street are fronted by banks of flowers and by mature trees. A datura plant leaned over a picket fence and shook its tiny inverted parachutes, as I stopped on the pavement to scribble a note. In the next yard a taratara, one of the few natives in this suburb of oaks and poplars, seemed to be absorbing the sulfur light from the dusk sun. Cook Street has been transformed since 1894, and it can be argued that, with its batallions of exotic trees and streets with determinedly British street names laid in grids over old kainga and pa and kumara beds, Hamilton as a whole is one of the most thoroughly transformed, thoroughly Anglicised, places in New Zealand. In the 1930s local politicians even went to the trouble of commandeering unemployed relief workers and demolishing the hill which sat on the edge of the city's business district. Known to Maori as Te Kopu Mania O Kirikiriroa, Garden Place Hill had been the site of an altar, and observatory, and an ancient grove of taro before 1864. Despite or because of its traditional significance, the hill was broken up and hauled away in wheelbarrows and trucks. I headed back down Cook Street past the bar, where Lady Gaga was still singing, crossed Grey Street, and found a view of the Waikato River from the carpark of a liquor shop. In the late sunlight the dirty water looked like varnished wood. I wondered whether Kendrick Smithyman was not romantic to believe that this environment has managed to defy those who have bought and settled on it since 1864. Doesn't the transformation of Hamilton mock the poet's view of settlement as a crisis-ridden and ultimately doomed enterprise? How can the 'land', to which Smithyman rather sentimentally gave a female identity, really resist the changes wrought by tar and concrete and a thousand alien names? Leila Adair may have been dragged back down to earth, and balloons may still sometimes fall out of the sky, but what about the scores of planes that land every day at Hamilton's international airport?

But then I remembered the bankrupt 'developments' in Hamilton's northern suburbs, where tarred roads peter out amidst ragwort and toitoi, or beside the rotting ribs of half-finished houses. In the north the sort of real estate boom that would have delighted the old Land Associations was brought to a brusque end by the global economic crisis of 2008. Developers declared themselves insolvent and, in the tradition of the soldier-settlers of the 1860s, walked off the land they had occupied with such confidence. The many FOR SALE signs on Cook Street suggest that the housing crisis may be spreading south. Kendrick Smithyman may yet be proven correct.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

(Mis)understanding 1951

2012-01-17T19:19:00.018+13:00

Once again this blog is off the political pace. While Chris Trotter has been banging out an open letter to David Shearer, appealing to the Bible as well as to the shadow of Harry Holland in an effort to get the newly minted Labour leader to support Auckland wharfies in their battle against union-busters, I've been wandering through the virtual forest that is Papers Past, looking for connections between the Zeppelin Scare that beset New Zealand for a couple of months in 1909 and the transition from villa to bungalow housing in East Hamilton in the first half of the twentieth century.

Encouraged by Chris's talk of parallels between the present dispute on the wharves and the Waterfront lockout of 1951, not to mention the Great Strike of 1913, I thought I'd dig out a review I wrote, all the way back in 2001, of Anna Green's study of the drama of 1951. I was discomforted, though, when I took a look at the review, which appeared in the now-defunct Marxist journal revolution. My criticisms of Green's book seemed reasonable enough, but my almost unrelenting defence of Dick Scott's 151 Days, an insider's account of the lockout published by the Communist Party soon after the end of the struggle, seems a little quixotic.

While Scott fought on the side of the angels in 1951, his rambling, incorrigibly subjective book can hardly be considered the final word on the lockout. The emotive early pages of his tome, which seek to present the 1951 battle as the simple continuation of an unbroken history of class struggle stretching back all the way to the Wakefield settlements, are particularly problematic. By cherrypicking examples of heroic workers' struggle and ignoring counterexamples of apathy, cross-class collaboration against Maori and other minorities like Chinese, and intra-working class conflict, Scott offers up a quite misleading image of this country's history.

Although Scott never admitted it, and perhaps never even realised it, his first book was contradicted by many of his subsequent productions. His important studies of colonial brutality at Parihaka and in the Cooks and Niue, for instance, show quite clearly the extent to which Pakeha of all classes could identify with each other, in opposition to Polynesians. 151 Days began with an account of a strike by workers in the Wakefield settlement of New Plymouth, but Ask that Mountain showed that the Pakeha workers and small farmers of Taranaki were complicit in the smashing of the Parihaka commune in the early 1880s. In Would a Good Man Die?, Scott shows how a horny-handed son of the Pakeha working class created a police state on Niue in the name of colonial munificence, and was eventually assasinated for his troubles.

My review of Green's book was written at a time when South Island wharfies were resisting an attempt to casualise their jobs. I knew a number of people who were standing on picket lines in places like Port Chalmers, and I remember writing one or two agitational articles about the dispute for the far left press. At the same time, I was contemplating doing a PhD, and getting interested in the idea of digging out a few archives. I was trying to balance an enthusiasm for political activism and agitational literature with a growing interest in and respect for scholarship, and the result was an odd mixture of political and scholarly, or pseudo-scholarly, arguments.

I criticised Anna Green for having a social democratic, and therefore reformist worldview - but I was not content with making the normal far left political criticism of such a position. I linked her reformism to what I saw as her failure to organise her empirical research into the 1951 dispute around an hypothesis - a 'big idea'. And I tried to ennoble Dick Scott's first book by disguising its unsustainably heroic narrative of New Zealand working class history as a 'bold' and 'robust' 'hypothesis'. I might have defended parts of 151 Days in detail, but I felt it best to pass other sections over in silence. The Communist Party had been badly damaged by Stalinism and its cultural tentacle, Zhdanovism, by the early 1950s, and Scott's text was at times as full of philistinism and national chauvinism as an issue of The Truth. After Uncle Joe had told them that postwar New Zealand was being colonised culturally as well as economically by the United States, the Communist Party had decided, presumably against the advice of the long-suffering RAK Mason, to campaign against such symptoms of decadent imperialist culture as Abstract Expressionist painting, comic strips, and jazz. Scott's book concludes, not with a tribute to the workers who fought so hard against Sid Holland in 1951, but with a rant about the role comics were playing in the corruption of Kiwi youth. Why Scott didn't excise such passages when his book was reissued in 2001 I don't know.

I still had the notion, a decade ago, that scholarship could only be satisfactory if it were linked to political agitation. Without the discipline of activism, and the need to convert piles of data and abstruse theorising into hard-hitting articles and leaflets, the scholar was, I thought, doomed to go off the rails, and become politically and intellectually suspect. It never occurred to me that my demand for political purity amongst scholars might be a way of insulating myself against difficult arguments, or that the past might be important precisely because it wasn't always 'relevant' to the present - wasn't, in other words, immediately convertible into some snappy lesson in political morality.

It was not possible for me to understand, in 2001, that an avowedly apolitical historian had recently published a powerful and heretical interpretation of the past Dick Scott was content to romanticise. Miles Fairburn's book The Ideal Society and Its Enemies overthrew all the smug pieties of both revoluationary socialists like Dick Scott and liberal nationalists like Keith Sinclair and Erik Olssen, by insisting that, for Pakeha at least, the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were characterised not by mateship and the beginnings of the road to the welfare state, but rather by an almost misanthropic individualism.

Fairburn's version of the nineteenth century has been condemned by many lefties, because it seems to make events like the Great Strike of 1913 and the lockout of 1951 into aberrations. Ultimately, though, and no matter what Howard Zinn and his local avatars have said, the left is better served by accurate interpretations than by sentimental stories. Perhaps comrade Fairburn will produce a study of the 1951 lockout?

Now that I've disowned it, here's that text from 2001...

British Capital, Antipodean Labour: Working the New Zealand Waterfront, by Anna Green (University of Otago Press, 2001)

Perhaps Anna Green is brave to write a history of an event as contemporary as the 1951 Lockout.* The fiftieth anniversary of the Lockout has been marked by a number of reunions, several public meetings, numerous arguments over talkback radio and dinner tables, and a major conference featuring, amongst other things, the launch of British Capital, Antipodean Labour.

Though some of the backward glances have no doubt been prompted by the anti-casualisation struggle currently being waged on the South Island waterfront, the great Lockout and the strikes that flared up around it have always been a fount of division and inspiration for New Zealanders: a source of argument, a store of legend and anecdote, and a litmus test for leftists. I even know a sad old man who, as an excessively idealistic teenager, broke up with his girlfriend over the issue! It might seem, then, that 1951 is a piece of their history that New Zealanders take too seriously to leave to historians.

Perhaps the choppy waters surrounding the subject of 1951 seemed inviting to Anna Green when she began, in the late 1980s, to research the PhD that forms the basis of British Capital, Antipodean Labour. After all, what budding Kiwi historian wouldn’t want ‘Sorted out 51’ on their CV? To take a subject surrounded by superheated debate, and coolly research it into clear focus - that’s the mission statement of British Capital, Antipodean Labour. For Green, good academic history is to be wrested from polemic, from the 'myths of New Zealand labour historiography'.

To understand Green’s book, then, we have to understand the academic enterprise it advertises. There’s something touching about the image of The Historian, seated in an unnaturally quiet room, leafing intently through piles of indecently obscure
documents. Of course, historians haven’t always been everyone’s favourite pedants: Herodotus, the founder of the genre, was justly dubbed ‘the Father of Lies’, and many of his disciples have been too concerned with the truth to be all that bothered with facts. It was the Victorians, that race of collectors, who came up with the idea of the historian as fact-finder and storer, and were able to imagine an ‘Ultimate History’, the results of the labours of generations of historians, which might contain all the facts of history, and nothing else.

The Victorian creed of pedantry took a few hits in the twentieth century, when pesky philosophers of history showed up on the academic scene with awkward questions about awkward terms like the fact-value distinction and the theory-dependence of observation, but managed eventually to resurrect itself in a doctrine often called ‘social’ or ‘grassroots’ history.

Although it has frequently posed as a new ‘history from below’, enamoured of the minutae of the lives of the members of that mythical race, ‘ordinary people’, social history has often been afflicted by very Victorian hang-ups about the sanctity of facts, and the sinfulness of ‘speculation’. Like its dour grandmother, social history tends to blush at the idea of constructing a ‘big picture’ of long-term historical trends to complement its detailed sketches of individual pieces of the past.

Cautious in tone, ultra-empirical in methodology, and studiously myopic, British Capital, Antipodean Labour seems to me to be a graduate of the school of social
history. And it should not be thought that all Green’s toil have been in vain: she has unearthed, with admirable care, some fascinating and potentially quite useful information about the world of the New Zealand waterfront up until 1951. Interviews with dozens of ageing seagulls and an inspection of the archives of British shipping companies have been especially fruitful. As a result of these labours, we now have a picture of the great extent of the wharfies’ use of what Green calls ‘informal resistance’ (clue: Sid Holland would call it lounging and stealing), not to mention a powerful impression of the amorality of the British-based shipping companies that gave the wharfies most of their work.

The irony of British Capital, Antipodean Labour, and the thing that makes it so irritating to read, is the fact that Green’s methodology cannot deal with
the implications of the subject-matter it has unearthed in such quantities. To put it bluntly, Green’s book tells us how, but does not tell us why. Her close-up focus
is great for revealing detail, but she is unable to make sense of that detail by putting it in the perspective that only a long shot can provide. Consider the following passage, from the book’s introduction, where Green makes a rare foray into the dangerous realm of historiography:

Undoubtedly, the waterfront dispute had far wider consequences than most industrial conflicts...Two myths of New Zealand’s labour historiography have shaped rival interpretations. The first, the dominant liberal left myth, is informed by a dichotomy of struggle between labour militants and moderates. From this perspective, the militants who controlled the watersiders’ union in 1951 rejected arbitration, thereby unwisely challenging the power of the state, and as a consequence destroyed both the union, and public confidence in the Labour party....The second - socialist - myth derives from that deep vein of millennial thought in which a heroic working class fights to create socialism.

As Dick Scott explained in the introduction to his book on 1951, ‘...the task, as I saw it in the circumstances, was to record all that positive in the great struggle, all that has gone to enrich our brave traditions’...neither myth, as advanced in the previous literature, provides an adequate explanation for the events of 1951. The dispute did not emerge from a vacuum, but exploded after a long period of conflict.

One wonders how Green can claim that Dick Scott did not recognise the 'long period of conflict' that preceded the explosion of 1951, if the Dick Scott she talks about is indeed the same Dick Scott who wrote 151 Days, the first and best extended treatment of the 1951 Lockout. After all, Scott’s tumultuous narrative
begins not in 1951 but in 1841, with an account of a strike, possibly this country’s first, by New Zealand Company employees in the miserable new settlement of New Plymouth. Scott was a member of the Communist Party of New Zealand when he wrote 151 Days, and his book is suffused with ideas of the eternal conflict of interest between worker and boss, and the necessity of class struggle.

Surely Green does not think that the 'brave traditions' referred to in 151 Days exclude the stoushes on the Kiwi waterfront in the decades before 1951? It is in fact Green, and not Scott, who has difficulty in giving a sense of historical perspective to 1951 and its precursors. We can this see this much when we consider the sentence which follows those quoted above:

In seeking to explain the abysmal labour relations on the waterfront, it is essential to to examine the labour process on the wharves: the nature of the work and the way in which it was organised by the employers, for it is here that so
much of the conflict began.

Encountering this sentence, I immediately wanted to ask ‘Why did the work take on the particular nature it had?’ and ‘Why did the employers organise the work in the ways that they did?’ In other words, why did the employers try to get total control of the wharfies’ work, and make them work in such dirty, dangerous conditions?'

Unlike Green, Scott had answers to these questions - he saw the capitalist drive for profits, and the alleged fact that increased profits could only come from the increased exploitation of labour, as the reasons for control freak shipping companies making wharfies risk their lives in filthy conditions. In giving these answers, he relied on a big historical picture, which was the product of the analysis of, amongst other things, many other specimens of industrial conflict, to make the sense of the details of the conflict on New Zealand’s waterfront.

I am not suggesting that Scott’s is the only sensible possible treatment of the 1951 Lockout and the conflicts that preceded it; rather, I am arguing that Green’s research has been insufficiently informed by the sort of hypothesis - I have been calling it a ‘big picture’ - that might be able to illuminate the facts she has unearthed. It’s all very well to collect facts, but facts need the explanation that can only be provided by a sophisticated hypothesis - a hypothesis which of course ought to be open to falsification and modification. Part of the problem for Green is thatthe details her close ups capture are so extraordinary and controversial that, for the New Zealand reader at least, they demand an explanation of the type she seems most reluctant to give.

Unwilling to explain it with reference to something exterior to it, Green tends to mystify aspects of her subject matter. In the pseudo-explanation of waterfront conflict quoted above, for instance, Green mystifies the features of her ‘labour process’. The “nature of the work” and the way that the work 'was organised by employers' cannot serve as explanations for the struggles between wharfies and employers, simply because they are effects of that struggle. As new evidence unearthed by Green shows, the dirty and dangerous nature of waterfront work was the product of employer penny-pinching, not any immanent quality of that work.

Similarly, the relentless attempts of the shipping companies to exert total control over wharfies’ work were the product of their own obsessive drive for efficiency on the waterfront, not any abstract necessary condition for a functioning waterfront.
Like the crude environmentalist who fingers technology as the ‘cause’ of pollution, neglecting to mention the social relations that govern the use of technology in capitalist society, Green blames the features of the ‘labour process’ for conflict on the waterfront, when these features were the product of a set of social relations, viz. the relationship between wharfies and their employers. Any examination of this relationship would lead away from her immediate subject matter into an examination of the wider historical world which gave this relationship its shape, and is thus off limits.

When the new subject matter she presents pushes especially urgently towards generalisation, Green resorts to conceptual hi-jinks in an effort to neutralise its implications. The title of her book reflects her introduction of a supposed “third party” - the British-based shipping companies - into the “old story” of waterfront conflict between workers and the state. By presenting ‘British Capital’ as having interests which importantly contradict those of Sid Holland’s government and its Kiwi capitalist supporters, Green attempts to prevent the evidence she has unearthed for the contradictory interests of shipping companies and wharfies being mobilised as evidence for a class struggle-centred account of waterfront conflict. If Dick Scott had had access to all Green’s material showing the shipping companies’ hatred for the wharfies, and of the contradictory interests that formed this hatred, he would have happily (too happily, perhaps) counted it as yet more evidence for his picture of 1951 and its precursors as a confrontation between two classes with hopelessly contradictory interests. After all, the British capitalists and the Kiwi capitalists were both members of the same class, weren’t they? However much they might disagree over issues like port charges and taxation, the British and Kiwi capitalists had a fine common cause in their war against the wharfies. Both, after all, had a huge interest in the efficient functioning of the ports of the old British empire.

The whole conception of ‘Kiwi capitalists’ as distinct from ‘British capitalists’ seems slightly dubious when applied to the first half of the twentieth century. Only a few decades before the period Green studies Britons had created capitalism in New Zealand, bankrolling the development of the country’s productive forces.

The emergent capitalist class in New Zealand retained very close ties to the class of the 'Mother Country', investing shares in its companies and offspring in its universities. It is by no means obvious that the two groups grew far apart in the first half of the twentieth century. Green can only ignore the huge importance of the common interests of Kiwi and British capital, and thereby keep her ‘discovery’ of a “third party” viable, because of her refusal to consider her subject in terms of anything exterior to it. By treating the force of capital in an ahistorical way, i.e. by isolating it in the narrow focus of the New Zealand waterfront in the years between 1915 and 1951, she is able to split it along national lines, and distort a conflict that fundamentally contained only two parties.

Another of Green’s conceptual hi-jinks involves the treatment of the ‘informal resistance’ offered by wharfies to the shipping companies’ work regime. British Capital, Antipodean Labour offers up fascinating evidence of such practices as spelling (rotated ‘loafing’ on the job), gliding (leaving the job early) and theft, and shows that they were forms of direct industrial action. Green is anxious, however, to assert the ultimate futility of informal resistance: according to her, it undermined attempts by some union bosses to gain 'workers’ control' of the waterfront by more formal means.

Green’s 'workers’ control' is a rather miserable predecessor of the ‘partnership model’ of worker-boss relationships championed in the 1980s and early '90s by the likes ofKen Douglas. 'Workers’ control' of the waterfront was thankfully rejected by Jock Barnes and the left wing of the wharfies’ union, and junked after 1947. In
a revealing passage, Green quotes a pitch for 'workers’ control' made to the shipping companies by union bureaucrat Nigel Roberts in the early 40s:

If we can get control of the job we will be the responsible ones to fire them [‘troublesome watersiders’] out. Our trouble today is that we cannot get rid of them because we are not the employers. Make us the employer and we will see that they play the game...

Commenting on Roberts’ words, Green claims that 'The contradiction between strategies of resistance and self-management [i.e. in Green’s book, ‘workers’
control’] could not have been more clearly expressed'. Here Green’s notion that grassroots rebellion on the wharves and the managerial ambitions of Roberts were strategies in pursuit of the same aim is truly absurd: informal resistance and Roberts’ ‘workers’ control’ were not different routes to the same port, but different routes to entirely different ports. Unable to escape the confines of her subject matter byimagining a genuine case of workers’ control, Greens ends up betraying the implications of the material she has uncovered on informal resistance.

In summary, then, the extreme measures British Capital, Antipodean Labour takes to accommodate the events of 1951 within the paradigm of naively empirical social history end up making it a confusing and unsatisfying read. Many of New Zealand’s social scientists get away with naive empiricism, but Green has chosen a subject which is too demanding of such a technique. 1951 was a year in which extraordinary things happened - a year in which the basic, usually hidden features of New Zealand society suddenly showed themselves with a frightening clarity in the form of Sid Holland’s short-lived police state and the opposition it so effectively crushed. For the pamphleteers in prison and the marchers on the end of long batons, the need for a big picture to explain very big, almost unimaginable events was only too clear. It was people like these who, a year after the end of the Lockout, bought out the first edition of Dick Scott’s 151 Days . Despite its flaws Scott’s book managed to open up a real historical perspective on the waterfront war, offering an extraordinary explanation for extraordinary events. Can Anna Green’s book, full as it is with new-found facts, offer half as much understanding of its subject as 151 Days?

* Green would no doubt argue that her book is about far more than just the 1951 Lockout: it is, afterall, subtitled Working the New Zealand Waterfront, 1915-1951, and deals with the world of the waterfront during those years inconsiderable detail. In my opinion, however, the whole of the book is orientated toward the year 1951, and its pre-1951 material is intended primarily to throw light upon the events of that year.

Return of the cossacks

2012-01-13T23:48:00.029+13:00

I'm sorry to have neglected this blog over the past few days: I once again defied my father's advice and ventured beyond that modern Hadrian's Wall, the Bombay Hills, into the central Waikato, where the absence of a sea breeze makes walks across drained peat lakes and crawls through holloways of regenerating gorse and thistles particularly sticky work at this time of year.

I haven't been all that far from fibre optic cables, nor indeed from computers, but I like to pretend, whenever I'm in anything vaguely resembling the countryside, that I've left the apparatus of the global communications grid behind. I like to pretend, in fact, that New Zealand's provinces are full of communications dead zones, where GPS systems as well as internet and cellphone connections give out. Call me paranoid, if you like, but ever since I watched Ridley Scott's Body of Lies the initials GPS and the sight of unsheathed cellphones have made me think of CIA-owned satellites peering down through the earth's polluted skies, and of a fantastically aerodynamic missile waiting to fall from some unseen helicopter onto my bald sunburnt head.

Now that I'm back in Auckland and catching up on the news, I can see that not everyone holidaying in the backblocks has shared my aversion to modern communications. Both Tony Gibson, the union-busting Chief Executive Officer of Ports of Auckland, and Christine Fletcher, the retired Tory MP, have been holed up in remote and salubrious beach resorts, but that hasn't stopped them cellphoning various media outlets and denouncing, in language of Churchillian solemnity, the avarice and arrogance of those well-known scions of privilege, the wharfies of Auckland.

Gibson, who earns three quarters of a million dollars a year, and Fletcher, who married into New Zealand's wealthiest family, have both condemned the refusal of the wharfies to accept a 20% pay cut and the abolition of their collective contract. Sitting by the Coromandel seashore, Fletcher and Gibson have condemned the poor work ethic of the wharfies, who have been standing on a picket line in Auckland's drizzle. These people are so unconscious of their hypocrisy that they make Sarah Palin and Paris Hilton look like paragons of ironic self-awareness. (Perhaps, though, we shouldn't be too surprised: I think it was my old mate Roger Fox who liked to describe families like the Fletchers as the "cream of New Zealand", on the grounds that their members were "rich, white, and very thick".)

No one who cares about the right of employees to negotiate collective contracts will take any pleasure in the campaign that Gibson and his suited thugs have launched against the Maritime Union of New Zealand, but I suspect that at least one well-known historian will see the campaign as an opportunity to interest New Zealanders in their past.

Mark Derby has a longstanding interest in the Great Strike of 1913, which saw wharfies and other members of the 'Red' Federation of Labour clashing with gun-toting cops and drunken farmers riding half-wild horses. Nicknamed 'Massey's Cossacks', in honour of the union-busting Prime Minister who recruited them, the baton-swinging horsemen were tasked with breaking the picket lines wharfies had formed around the ports of Auckland and other cities.

Back in 2006 Mark Derby curated a well-received exhibition which exposed the ferocity of the Great Strike, and he has been interested in producing some new commemoration to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the conflagration. Now that Tony Gibson and his supporters in the National Party are talking openly about a drawn-out war to the death with the wharfies and their allies in other unions, nobody can doubt the relevance of the history lesson Mark offers.

Kendrick Smithyman was the son of a wharfie veteran of the Great Strike of 1913, and in his posthumously published book Imperial Vistas Family Fictions he offers up a series of poems about the conflict and its aftermath. Smithyman describes the idealism and confusion of the men and women who built the 'Red Feds' in the early years of the twentieth century, the epic strike and its ultimate failure, and the subsequent persecution of unionists like his father, who had to be smuggled out of the country in the hold of a ship so that he could seek sanctuary and work in tropical ports like Apia and Brisbane.

I'd better abandon this computer - Skyler is shouting at me to come to bed, and Tony Gibson and his mates are probably aiming a missile in the direction of my study - but here's one of the poems Smithyman wrote about the Great Strike of 1913:

Massey's Cossacks

They came in from the farms.
They liked the batons which Government made
for them; some liked better the batons
they made themselves.
Closing on Lyttelton
they found the road carpeted with sizeable
furniture tacks. When they charged in Featherston Street
marbles, glass stoppers, steel bearings
went under them. “A pity about the horses,
not about the Specials.”

Tom Young told an outdoors meeting,
“If they try to hit you, you hit them back.”
In court this became Inciting to Riot,
but that was three weeks later,
and another month before he was sentenced:
three months on The Terrace.
Father ran the office.

The Cossacks rode
home. They were not wiser, but they'd won.

Footnote: Chris Trotter has a useful analysis of the significance of the current battle on the waterfront and some suggestions about how to win it, while the Socialist Aotearoa site is asking supporters of the wharfies to sign an Open Letter to Len Brown and join the picket line.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Gu Cheng and the troubles of Chinese capitalism

2012-01-10T18:25:00.021+13:00

[Like all good Poundians, Hamish Dewe is a Sinophile. He spent the first decade of this century in China, working, studying Mandarin and writing mordant poems about the anabolic growth of capitalism in cities like Shanghai and Shenyang. In the second part of the interview we did last week I asked Hamish a few questions about the situation of China today...]

SH: What have you been reading lately?

HD: I've been rereading Gu Cheng, the exiled Chinese poet who killed himself and his wife on Waiheke Island in 1993. Although Gu Cheng is quite well-known, not all of his stuff has been translated, and I'm thinking of putting some of his early poems into English.

SH: Gu Cheng is perhaps more famous for the tragic manner of his death than for his poetry. His death was a major news story in New Zealand and in China, and a movie has been made about his troubled relationship with the woman he killed. Does the terrible end of Gu Cheng's life make it harder to approach his poetry?

HD: It does. There's probably a partial parallel with Ezra Pound, another great poet who did bad things (I've been following the debate about Pound on Reading the Maps). But I think that whereas Pound committed his sins over a period of many years, making anti-semitic statements in his writing, praising Mussolini and Hitler, and making hundreds of pro-fascist radio broadcasts during World War Two, Gu Cheng suffered a psychotic breakdown, and committed one cataclysmic action. There isn't evidence that the murder of his wife was premeditated.

I didn't know Gu Cheng personally, but it is apparent, from the many accounts of his life, that he was a very unstable person. Pound was of course spared the death penalty after World War Two because friends like TS Eliot and Ernest Hemingway managed to persuade the United States government that he was insane. Whether he was ever insane, in the ordinary sense of the word, is quite debatable, but it suited his supporters to present him that way, at least for a while. I don't think that many people would doubt that Gu Cheng was insane at the end of his life.

SH: Why did Gu Cheng wear a cut-off length of trouser leg on his head, as though it were a hat?

HD: He believed that it stopped people from stealing his thoughts.

SH: Is there a political dimension to Gu Cheng's breakdown? It is very easy to brand artists who suffer from severe mental illnesses as mad geniuses, and to thereby ignore the social and historical implications of their work. Gu Cheng was a man who often found himself on the wrong side of the Chinese state. As a youngster he was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and forced to do menial work in difficult conditions, for little or no recompense. Later, after returning to urban China and becoming known as one of the group of 'Misty' poets, who produced obscure yet politically resonant texts, he came under fire from the government of Deng Xiaoping. His poetry was criticised as 'decadent', because it departed from the tenets of propagandistic socialist realism, and his own father was induced to denounce him in print.

HD: Yes, that's an extraordinary essay. It begins 'I am finding it harder and harder to understand the poetry of my son, Gu Cheng...' The father was himself a poet, but he kept close to the socialist realist line, producing propaganda. Like many other figures in the Chinese literary establishment, he was troubled by the complexity of the texts that the Misty poets produced. They rediscovered the mystery and depth of the Chinese language, and their phrases and images have an ambiguity, a multidimensionality, which is anathema to political propaganda.

SH: And yet the Misty poets were not apolitical, were they?

HD: No. If they were apolitical then they would have been easier to dismiss. The Misty poets were able to find a middle way, if you like, between boneheaded propaganda and impenetrable obscurity. The images in their poems couldn't be reduced to a simple political meaning, but they nevertheless resonated with the hopes and fears of young Chinese readers. Consider Gu Cheng's famous phrase 'I have been given dark eyes, but I use them to search for light'. There is an allusion in this phrase to the experience of the generation of urban youth which was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, and to the attempts of the members of that generation to change China for the better after their return to the cities. But the allusion is not made explicit. There is no outright denunciation of the Chinese state. That would not have been possible in print, of course.

But I think you should be careful about jumping from that fact that Gu Cheng was persecuted by the Chinese authorities, and eventually had to leave the country, to the conclusion that he was fundamentally a political animal. I don't think politics was as important to him as his own personal phantasmagoria. He lived partly in a world of his imagination. He wasn't someone who could formulate a coherent political programme. If he had been allowed to stay in China then I think he would quite happily have done so. He had an intense attachment to the landscape of China, which he had acquired as a small child, and he never adjusted to life overseas. He refused to learn the English language, even after being given residency in New Zealand, because he was afraid of making the Chinese language 'jealous'.

And after he settled in New Zealand Gu Cheng chose, for whatever reason, to endure a 'double exile', by living on Waiheke Island, away from many of his supporters in the Chinese community of 'mainland' Auckland. He was very isolated. It was probably isolation, rather than political frustration, which contributed to his fate.

SH: The Misty poets were tremendously popular in the 1980s, selling tens of thousands of books and giving readings in stadiums. Does poetry have the same status in China today? Does it provoke the same excitement?

HD: In my experience it does not. There has been a growth in other forms of entertainment - movies, television, computer games, and so on - which has coincided with the economic boom and the growth of consumption. There are lots of writers, lots of books around in today's China, but fiction seems far more popular than poetry. Pulp fiction seems to be particularly popular. There's been quite a fad for slightly smutty novels about the urban underclass, for example -

SH: Might a new protest movement in China - a sort of Chinese version of the 'Arab Spring', or the demonstrations seen in countries like Greece and Spain - recreate an audience for poetry, or at least for serious literature?

HD: China is not without its problems, but I'm far from convinced that such a movement is in the offing. The Communist Party has managed to establish and consolidate the capitalist system in China over the past thirty years. Under the banner of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', the pursuit of profit and conspicuous consumption have been glorified. Young Chinese are, in my experience, far more interested in the acquisition of cellphones and i pods than they are in ideas like democracy.

And there is a material basis for the consciousness of young Chinese: there really has been, along the eastern seaboard of China, a considerable increase in wealth and spending power over the past few decades. Wages and salaries have increased greatly, albeit from a very low base. I'm not aware of many popular uprisings which took place in the midst of an economic boom -

SH: But some of the increases in wages and salaries have been won through the actions of unofficial unions - through strikes, even. And recently we saw an uprising in the Guangdong city of Wukan, which resulted in the expulsion of the Communist Party and the establishment of an independent local government - HD: Yes, but it seems to me that the movements you talk about are different from the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s. They are not based on ideas, ideas about an alternative society, but on a desire to get a bigger slice of the wealth in actually existing Chinese society. They do not question the system - they only seek to reform it. The union movement may be technically illegal, and indeed may be persecuted, but it could well ultimately benefit Chinese capitalism, by increasing the spending power of Chinese workers, and thus growing the internal market for goods manufactured in China. As the global recession cuts spending power in Europe and America, China is aware that it must find buyers at home for more of its own goods.

I note, as well, that the Wukan protesters have reached an agreement with the Chinese government, and reopened their town to the outside world. I see the union movement and Wukan-style protest movements as having very little intellectual content. I therefore can't see them creating the sort of ferment of ideas we saw in parts of China in the 1980s. But I could be wrong.

SH: Do you think serious economic problems are a prerequisite for widespread dissent in China?

HD: Chinese people, especially in the populous east, have become accustomed, over the last two or three decades, to increases in wealth, in spending power. If that trend was to end suddenly, without any convincing explanation, then the legitimacy of the Communist Party might be eroded. The Communist Party might become a victim of its anti-intellectualism and opportunism. The party has essentially said, for decades now, that it deserves to be in power because it is making China wealthier. If the economy runs into a wall, then the party can hardly revive the sort of voluntarist rhetoric of Mao, who decried bourgeois consumerism and called for sacrifices in the building of socialism. I don't mean to defend Mao, or contrast him positively with the current Communist Party leadership - I'm just pointing out that he had more ideological and rhetorical resources in the face of hard times than the current leaders would have.

If there is a crisis in the Chinese economy, it might well be prompted by the property market. Real estate in China is extraordinarily expensive, especially given the fact that one cannot buy freehold there - everything is leased, albeit for a long time, from the government. Because economic opportunity is focused on the eastern seaboard, in cities like Shanghai, there has been a massive internal migration in this direction over recent decades. A shortage of apartments has seen prices soar. The increase in consumer spending power has only made the problem worse, because people are competing for apartments.

You can nowadays buy a nice house in the Auckland suburbs for the price of a lease on a rundown apartment in an unglamorous part of Shanghai. Apartments in Shanghai are priced by the square metre, and it's not unusual for a square metre to go for the equivalent of eight thousand dollars. Speculators are going wild. It is quite possible that property in many parts of China is currently overvalued, and if reality catches up with the property market we could see a crash, and people owning mortgages worth more than their apartments. In the meantime, don't buy a place in China...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Anti-humanism, jazz, and Oceania: a briefing with Hamish Dewe

2012-01-06T16:14:00.041+13:00

Back in 1995 a cantankerous poet and printer named Alan Loney photocopied and stapled together a few poems and stories by his friends, and gave the resulting sheaf of paper the rather grand title A Brief Description of the Whole World.

Over the past seventeen years Loney's creation has evolved into a stylish, eclectic journal called brief, which has published forty-three issues, attracted the services of a series of editors, and regularly won funding from Creative New Zealand.

I edited a couple of issues of brief back in 2005-2006, and I'm guest editing the 44th issue of the journal, which will have the theme of Oceania. Hamish Dewe edited the 43rd issue of brief, and I wanted to talk with him about his experiences, and about my plans for number 44. When I dropped into Hamish Dewe's house this morning he was stretched out in his backyard, close to the place where a great plain of mud-grey concrete gives way to plots of rising corn and spinach, and reading Wyndham Lewis' supposedly unreadable novel Roaring Queen.

As long-time readers of this blog will know, Hamish has never been afraid to talk turkey, and he took pleasure in both defending his own editorial principles and questioning my ideas for the next issue of brief. Here's a transcript of my interview with the man who was once described as 'the Ezra Pound of Auckland'...

SH: With its relatively small number of contributors and lack of obvious editorial interventions, your issue of brief might seem like a throwback to the early days of the journal in the mid-'90s...

HD: The similarity wasn't intentional. Back in the early days Alan Loney gave contributors ten or so pages each and let them do what they wanted - he was leasing space on the shop floor. I haven't done that. I've selected - I've rejected.

SH: Do you think that an editor needs to be an interventionist?

HD: Yes, unless he or she is a utopian. In the best of all worlds free expression might be possible. In practice, though, writers tend to need pressure from outside. They need to be told when they're producing shit. Loney's laissez-faire approach meant that writers felt free to fill up their allotted pages with shit.

SH: You didn't include any of your own writing in your issue of brief. Other editors, myself included, haven't been so modest...

HD: I see the editor as somebody leading a group, without dominating it. A group of musicians, say. I used to belong to an improvisational jazz band. The most difficult thing to do, in a band like that, is to know when not to play -

SH: Miles Davis used to sit out whole songs -

HD: That's right. I want to supervise things but I don't want to take over. SH: brief has been the focus for a number of controversies over the years, as it has evolved. Alan Loney handed the editorship to John Geraets, who began to solicit work from a wider circle of writers and to comment on important cultural and political issues. Jack Ross succeeded Geraets and began to publish people Loney disapproved of, and to editorialise about subjects like the Iraq war and the imprisonment of Ahmed Zaoui. Loney felt the journal had changed too much, and urged a boycott of it -

HD: Loney is a control freak.

SH: But he felt that he was making principled criticisms of the way the journal was evolving. He had wanted brief to be a sort of record of the work being done by neglected Kiwi writers - by members of what he called 'the Other Tradition' -

HD: That tradition existed mainly in Loney's head. Loney himself wasn't neglected - he got grants, residencies, published a couple of books with Auckland University Press - and neither were many of the contributors neglected.

SH: Loney seemed to derive some obscure psychological gratification from imagining himself as a victim of persecution. Admittedly, his antics annoyed so many people that he eventually really became a neglected, if not persecuted, figure. He now lives overseas and has few contacts with the New Zealand literary scene. How do you regard brief, today?

HD: I see it as a way of cohering a community. There's a group of writers who share their work in the journal. I'm wary about making too many generalisations about their work, though -

SH: There's been some discussion at Reading the Maps about the future of offline publishing in general, and offline literary publishing in particular. In this age of online living, is it possible for a literary community to cohere around a print journal? HD: I admit to belonging to various social media. Facebook, twitter. But I'm a lurker at those places, not a poster. I don't feel entirely comfortable in the online world. I love the old-fashioned print publication. I love the spine, the pages, the coarseness of paper. I write in pages, and I think in pages. The page is my horizon. I simply can't concentrate in the endlessness of cyberspace.

SH: Do you sympathise, then, with those technosceptics who wonder whether the online reading of literature is an entirely good thing?

HD: People like Nicholas Carr who argue that in twenty years kids won't be able to read Tolstoy because their brains will have been rewired by the net strike me as a little extreme. But I wonder whether the advocates of internet literature have forgotten the importance of constraints. So many great works of art, of literature, have been built around constraints. The sonnet is a constraint. The diptych is a constraint. The cartoon frame is a constraint. Grammar is a constraint. You can't think without constraints. The open-endedness of the internet, the ability of a site to grow and grow, seems to excite many people: I don't know why. I like short poems partly because I like to be able to see all of what I'm reading in one glance. I'm a synoptic reader. I annoyed Brett Cross, who was laying my issue of brief up, because I insisted on putting those poems which covered two pages on facing pages. I couldn't bear to split them.

SH: And you also have a liking for old-fashioned means of composition?

HD: I like to compose long-handed. In fact, I can't type poetry. I hate the finality of type, and I hate the neutrality of type. You strike a key, or press a keyboard button, and you get the same letter as you got the last time you hit the key or button. It feels mechanical. It is mechanical. But when you write you can vary the size and shape and darkness of your letters, of your words. You can cross out errors or unacceptable truths. You can mutilate phrases. You can write corrections and queries between the lines. I know that a poem is usually published in print, not in longhand, but there is a thread, a secret thread, that goes through the composition process, that insinuates its way into the published text, when you compose in longhand...

SH: Can I ask you about the cover of your issue of brief?

HD: It was my favourite image from Wall, an exhibition of drawings held by Ellen Portch at Elam last year. I am interested in the character it shows. I call him Sexless Man. And I like the form of the drawing. I like its extreme structuring. I like the regularity and repetition.

SH: Is the drawing a sort of visual equivalent of the poems you like?

HD: I do like poems that have a structure apart from the ego.

SH: That's quite a resonant phrase but I'm not sure exactly what it means. Can you unpack it for me?

HD: Must I? I like resonant phrases. I have a tendency to talk in aphorisms...I guess what I mean is that I don't like poems which revolve around individual selves. I don't think the self offers the best vantage point on the world

SH: You want something larger than the self?

HD: Something smaller.

SH: I was listening to an interview with Alice Oswald, the British poet and translator of The Iliad, and she was criticising the tendency of Westerners to see the countryside in Romantic terms, in the terms that Wordsworth and his friends established so long ago. She was arguing that there are many ways to see a landscape, to see the world, and she asked the question "How does a landscape look from the point of view of moss?" Is that the sort of question you're trying to answer?

HD: Not really. Isn't it very Romantic to think you can impersonate moss, instantiate yourself as moss in a cave? What fanciful bullshit! If you're talking about models for breaking down the self, breaking through the self, I'd prefer you to discuss Louis Althusser and his anti-humanist approach to the world -

SH: You like Althusser's idea that humans aren't the centre of the world, that humans don't really even control their own actions, and that human history isn't heading towards any sort of great goal?

HD: Very much so. I don't like Marxists who talk about dialectics. To me dialectics always seems to involve some idea of synthesis, or reconciling small things in terms of something bigger. I don't want reconciliation. I want fragments. I think that what makes us human is the small stuff, the forces and processes that pass through us, under the radar, so to speak, of our superegos, or even our conscious minds -

SH: Stuff like -

HD: - hunger, boredom, lust...

SH: Are you surprised that a number of people have called you a pessimistic writer?

HD: No. And I take such criticism as a compliment. A while ago I was called dour. That was meant as a criticism. I took it as a very great compliment. SH: Can I ask you to name a favourite text from brief 44?

HD: I don't want to talk about a favourite but I'd like to draw attention to the poems by Vaughan Rapatahana. They hark back to the early days of the journal -

SH: That seems to me a weird thing to say, because Vaughan's poems are short and carry readily accessible, strongly political messages. By contrast, a lot of the stuff in Alan Loney's brief seemed quite abstract and elaborate. HD: Yes, Vaughan's work is political. He sits in exile in Hong Kong passing judgment on Maori and Pakeha alike for their perceived xenophobia and philistinism. He is disgusted by the way Australia and New Zealand act as deputies for the US in the Pacific. He is worried about the threat that the English language and Western culture poses to Pacific island societies.

But can't someone write poems which are passionately political and at the same time linguistically adventurous? Just take a look at the way Vaughan, in his polemical fury, mutilates his words and lines, throwing letters and whole phrases across the pages. Just look at the way the meaning of his poems is tied up with the shape his poems makes on their pages. He reminds me of some of the wild Futurist poets of the early twentieth century - of Marinetti, for example, who tried to simulate the feeling of war on the page by going berserk with typography...

SH: I think Vaughan has brought something different to brief, and to similar spaces where he has published over the last year or so. brief has - let's face it - been a journal dominated by urban middle-class Pakeha, but Vaughan has a very different background -

HD: And his concerns are different. His focus on rural Maori society, and on the Pacific -

SH: And his work in trying to save Pacific languages. As you know, I'm editing the next issue of brief, and I've given it the theme of Oceania. I took the term Oceania from the late Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau'ofa, who disliked 'Pacific', because he thought that it suggested an ocean without people, rather than a set of peoples connected by water. I don't want to pretend to be anything but a palangi, and I don't want to pretend that brief isn't a palangi journal - I just want to bring a few more Vaughan Rapatahanas into the literary consciousness of palangi Kiwis, and make a few of us, at least, think about our society and our writing in terms of the ocean and islands which surround us -

HD: That sounds very noble, but also quite problematic. brief represents a particular set of people - most of them are used to thinking in terms of a national New Zealand literary tradition, and in terms of European and North American writers. That's where their models come from. Is there any real chance they'll embrace cultural traditions they've never heard about before? I think they'll reply to your efforts with a resounding silence -

SH: It can be argued though that a silence about Oceania - a reticence about New Zealand's real geographical context, its real neighbours - underlies the whole history of palangi literature here. The nationalists who created the official model of New Zealand literature in the '30s, people like Allen Curnow and Charles Brasch and Frank Sargeson, were seduced by a vision of this country as a handful of islands floating in a vast empty ocean. We only need to think of some of the key phrases of Curnow's famous nationalist poems - phrases like 'Not in narrow seas', 'distance looks our way' and so on - to appreciate the emphasis on isolation, on loneliness.

Curnow and the other nationalists thought that New Zealand's great problem and opportunity was its isolation. And the 'internationalists' who challenged their programme - people like Louis Johnson - accepted, consciously or unconsciously, the notion of New Zealand as a very physically isolated place. Johnson argued that modern communications and literary tradition meant that there was 'an underground tunnel' between this country and Europe. He also pointed out that, in the postwar decades, we were drawing a lot closer culturally to America. But he apparently never thought to challenge the idea that New Zealand sat in the middle of a vast and empty ocean.

The reality is that, for many hundreds of years, the Pacific was a highway for Polynesian cultures. And in the nineteenth century writers like Melville celebrated Oceania as one of the great crossroads of humanity. Victorian New Zealanders considered the seas to their north as vital to their colony's future, and worked to build an island empire. The 'isolation' about which Curnow et al talk so often was an economic and political construct. After the advent of refrigerated shipping New Zealand became Britain's farm, and the Pacific became less economically important. And as New Zealand and other foreign powers annexed most of the Pacific Islands, restrictions were placed on movement across the ocean. Trade links to cities like Sydney and Auckland were lost, and Polynesian vaka were burnt.

As a result of all this, palangi Kiwis lost their awareness of the galaxy of societies which lay in the seas to their north. And it's surprising how little things have changed, despite the recent great migrations to New Zealand from the Pacific Islands. Epeli Hau'ofa celebrated the new mobility of island peoples in the late twentieth century, because he saw it as a reopening of the Pacific highway which palangi colonists had closed for decades. In Auckland some of the most vital art is being made by Pacific immigrants, or people with a 'Pasifika' background. Painters like Andy Leileisu'ao, who calls himself a Kamoan, or Kiwi Samoan, and Glen Wolfgramm, who describes Tonga as his 'foreign homeland', are doing remarkable work, as they bring palangi and Polynesian cultures into dialogue. But where are the palangi artists and writers attempting a similar dialogue? Why isn't the great emigration from the north stimulating us, as well?

HD: That's all very well, but you can't force people to take an interest in a particular culture. And you shouldn't try to tyrannise us with geography. Many brief contributors probably feel more comfortable with American literary models than Pacific literary models. That's alright.

SH: I don't want to tell people what to read. But it does seem to me that palangi Kiwi writers could be enriched by contact with other inhabitants of Oceania. There are all sorts of fascinating intellectual currents floating across the Pacific.

Over the past year and a half I've been investigating the Tongan intellectual scene, and in particular the 'Atenisi school of thought, which has its origins in a tumbledown private university on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa but now has adherants in universities across the world. Futa Helu, the founder of 'Atenisi, wanted to fuse Polynesian and classical Greek thought. I think that was a fascinating, if quixotic, ambition. I think Helu can teach us something about biculturalism, about cultural exchange. Futa Helu was passionate about Heraclitus - so is the poet and classicist Ted Jenner, one of the most prolific and distinguished contributors to brief. Paul Janman, whose movie about 'Atenisi was recently released, is a long-time reader of brief. I think there are connections waiting to be made.

HD: I think you need to be clear about the difference between exchange and appropriation. If you want to take something from another culture - fine. Picasso stole from the Africans, Pound stole from the Chinese. But appropriation is not the same as genuine exchange. I wish you well, but I think your Oceania issue will be an aberration in the history of brief. I don't think you're going to inaugurate a new era in the history of the journal. I think it's better to have smaller ambitions - to try to keep the quality of the journal high, and to introduce the odd new voice, like Vaughan Rapatahana. Your issue sounds like a utopian enterprise, and I am not a man for utopias.

Send submissions for brief 44 to shamresearch@yahoo.co.nz

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Blogging and the curse of coolness

2012-01-02T21:07:00.038+13:00

Only a few years ago blogging was being hailed, in the mass media and in academia, as a revolutionary medium of communication. The pundits told us, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that blogs, with their speed of publication and low costs, would inevitably supersede newspapers. Blogs were also tipped to transform literature by complicating or even obliterating the distinctions between author and reader. And politicians were warned that blogging would change the nature of public debate, as hordes of formerly quiescent citizens began posting their opinions online.

In 2004 the Merriam-Webster dictionary pronounced 'blog' the 'word of the year', and in 2005 the media revealed that a new blog was being created every second.

Today, though, blogs are out of fashion. A survey reported by the New York Times showed that blogging is fast losing popularity amongst younger people, who are much more enamoured of newer internet platforms like facebook and twitter. A Pew Research Centre survey of thousands of American web users suggests that blogging is also losing its appeal for older folks. The proprietor of Gombeen Nation, one of Ireland's most popular blogs, recently observed that, thanks to steadily falling readerships, his competitors 'are dropping like flies'. The internet is now littered with the hulks of abandoned blogs.

Blogging is in decline because it conflicts with both the profit drive of capitalist corporations and the consciousness of contemporary internet users.

Corporations find it relatively difficult to make money out of blogging - the potential for advertising is limited, compared to that available at e mail sites, facebook, and twitter, where new internet 'pages' are opened much more often. Blogging has failed to attract many of the celebrities - actors, musicians, sportspeople - whose tweets and facebook updates are followed by huge and lucrative audiences.

If blogging is out of tune with twenty-first century capitalism, it is also at odds with the thought patterns of many of the residents of developed societies. The millions of citizens who created accounts at sites like blogger.com, LiveJournal, and Wordpress soon ran out of enthusiasm for their new hobby, as the prospect of regularly turning out posts hundreds or thousands of words long came to seem oppressive rather than liberating.

With its draconian restrictions on word length, twitter spares its users the troublesome task or advancing and defending arguments. Slogans, non-sequitirs, and in-jokes replace premises and citations. Just as the brutally abbreviated 20-20 form of cricket removes most of the distinctions between good and bad players, so twitter destroys much of the difference between good and bad thinking. Martin Guptill can make a 20-20 half-century, and Charlie Sheen can become a literary star on twitter.

It is telling that politicians, who were generally rather unenthusiastic about blogging, have become some of the most prolific and popular tweeters. Political soundbites and slogans have been growing shorter and more fatuous for decades, and twitter is the perfect medium for the shortest and most fatuous of them.

With its endless opportunities for self-indulgence, facebook offers a similar escape from the tyranny of thought.

The popular abandonment of blogs in favour of twitter, facebook and other internet platforms that prioritise brevity and insouciance is part of a wider tendency in our culture. As Nicholas Carr has observed in his famous essay 'Is Google making us stupid?' and his follow-up book The Shallows, the internet is being used to enforce a 'Taylorisation' of the modern mind.

Just as the Taylorist method of factory management seeks to get higher and higher yields from workers by dividing their time into smaller and smaller portions and making their tasks more and more specific, so companies like Google are today trying, with the help of technology, to speed up and simplify our thinking. As workers become accustomed to speed-reading and multitasking at their computer terminals, their brains are, to some extent at least, rewired, so that they find it harder to do the sort of 'deep' reading and thinking which literature and serious political discourse demand. Blogging - good blogging, anyway - becomes more onerous, and the inanities of twitter and facebook become more appealing.

Whenever I wonder whether blogging will survive the second decade of the twenty-first century, I think of Alex Wild's The Constant Losers. In Wild's novel, which was published late in 2010 and recently received some well-deserved praise from Landfall, a young man and woman conduct a strange dialogue through the fanzines they self-publish and the cassette mix tapes they create and circulate.

The protagonists of The Constant Losers are twenty-something hipsters, familiar with the topography and nightlife of the bohemian zones of Auckland. Both characters are nevertheless preoccupied with the artefacts left behind by a pre-internet, pre-digital era of youth culture. For most members of their generation, the cassette anthology and the photocopied, stapled-together fanzine seem to require pointless amounts of solitary labour, and appear mendaciously resistant to the desires of readers and listeners. Their tracks and pages cannot be skipped or rearranged, or posted to a filesharing forum. But Wild's characters are enchanted by the fustiness of their cassettes and their fanzines. The scarcities and uncertainties inherent in old-fashioned DIY publishing excite them, as they seek rare issues of fanzines in the freebie racks of inner city music shops. They enthuse over the clunky fragility of their tapes, as well as the archaic hissing and sighing sounds which the cassettes impose like overdubs on the tunes they collect.

Some of Wild's readers have considered her novel a homage to youth and coolness, but I prefer, in my uncool, curmudgeonly way, to see the text as a dig at a civilisation addicted to technological and cultural innovation. Wild's characters rebel against the twenty-first century not by stripping off their clothes and heading for the nearest forest, but by retrieving and aestheticising the obsolete innovations of their parents' generation. Like Joseph Cornell, who made surreal worlds out of old-fashioned objects arranged in boxes, or Laurence Aberhart, who uses Victorian technology to photograph contemporary New Zealand, the heroes of The Constant Losers are determined to find a future in the past. The architecture of Wild's novel complements its theme. The Constant Losers appears, on the surface, to be a chaotic work, consisting as it does of fascimile-style 'reproductions' of the protagonists' respective fanzines. With their zany fonts, smudged black and white images, and corny or esoteric headlines, the zines don't initially look very considered, let alone artful.

But a closer examination of The Constant Losers reveals the author's almost classical concern with form. As they take turns entreating each other, Wild's protagonists balance and stabilise her text. The Constant Losers can be considered a novel of letters, in the tradition of Dostoevsky's Poor Folk and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Like her characters, Alex Wild refuses to prioritise fashion over history.

Blogging may have been superseded by new and inferior innovations, but the medium need not die. Indeed, bloggers should treat the rise of alternative forms of online communication as a liberation, rather than a disaster. Freed from the curse of coolness, blogging can now develop as a literary and artistic genre, or set of genres. Blogging may have lost some of its old practitioners, but it should be able to attract writers, artists, and political thinkers dissatisfied with the short attention span of twitter and the ritualised onanism of facebook. Blogging may become an act of resistance against the dumbing down of culture and political discourse in the twenty-first century.

Here in New Zealand, Richard Taylor's exciting, perplexing Eyelight is exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the hyperlink, and testing the limits of the internet 'page'. On a series of quieter but equally strange sites, Jack is showing that the blog can become a sort of cultural memory bank. Ross' A Gentle Madness documents his bibliomania, while his edition of the late Leicester Kyle's lost works is bringing an important writer out of the shadows. With his insistence on publishing one seriously researched blog-essay at the same time every week, Giovanni Tiso is using blogging to make a stand against our culture's tendency towards brevity and superficiality. Over at the Kea and Cattle blog, the newly-minted Rhodes Scholar Andrew Dean has been showing that wild eclecticism and intellectual rigour can go together, as he publishes mini-essays about subjects as different as depressed cricketers, South Island regionalism, Rilke, and The Simpsons.

Like the characters in Alex Wild's first novel, today's bloggers are consciously rejecting fashion, and showing the possibilities inherent in a supposedly outmoded medium of communication.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Breaking into fact

2011-12-29T18:00:00.010+13:00

Whenever I examine a newspaper I steer around articles dealing with individual tragedies and outrages - car crashes and house fires and child abductions and murders - and instead read reports on more general, abstract subjects, like political conflicts or economic crises or demographic changes.

I justify this preference to Skyler by explaining that I see the world in materialist terms, and regard history as the working out of broad forces and grand structures. I tell Skyler that individual human tragedies and triumphs are not, in the scheme of things, significant, and thus don't count as news, in the proper sense of the word.

But there's a less intellectual reason why I try to steer clear of the tragedies that are part of every day's news. I find reading about crimes like the recent violent assault on a small girl in a Turangi holiday camp both distressing and depressing. I'm hardly alone in this, of course: the atrocity in Turangi has disturbed people up and down New Zealand. Even those of us who have avoided newspaper articles and talkback radio have received details of the crime and updates on the hunt for its perpetrator, courtesy of angry family members and friends.

A crowd laid siege to the Taupo District Court yesterday, as a young man appeared there on charges relating to the attack in nearby Turangi. A lot of Kiwis will be fantasising about the punishments they'd mete out to the attacker, if only they were given the opportunity.

While this sort of aggressive response to a heinous crime is rational enough, and may even have some therapeutic value, it seems to me to be somehow inadequate to the sheer mystery of evil. From Eichmann to Harold Shipman, the perpetrators of terrible crimes always seem somehow slight, once they are captured and safely removed from the scenes of their deeds. The reporters and psychologists who observe their appearances in the dock and interview them in prison meeting rooms, seeking some clue about ideology and motive, tend to be disappointed. It seems impossible to square the evil of the crimes with the pathetic lives and unimpressive countenances of the perpetrators. If we want to understand the evil of a Shipman or a Manson we must look beyond the individual, into history and sociology and the structure of the human mind.

The annotated selection of Kendrick Smithyman's poems I published last year included a text prompted by one of the most notorious murders in modern New Zealand history. Smithyman disliked easy rhetoric and over-certainty, and his discussion of the killing of Kirsa Jensen is both complex and sensitive. I've reproduced Smithyman's poem below, along with the commentary which I gave it in last year's book.

FICTION FACT

The not well chosen motel looks over the road
to the marshalling yard. They've a current row
about reducing staff, not enough work
to warrant; conceivably this might be why the yard
worked all night but seemed to get nowhere.
A few jolts forward, some coupling, clanking,
a few jolts back, some pointless heavy breathing
from too-long stationary diesel locos.
These are of course Bulgarian motors.
One has heard about Bulgarians, Smiley might tell more

whose prose leaps in the small hours from Kipling, the Great Game,
to Greene, the enduringly painful down at heel
talent which Evil has for breaking
any gloss of fiction, into fact.
That place which we passed, rivermouth
a few kilometres south which is historically
connected with missionary endeavour,
in a day or two there
a girl child will fall
from her horse, a middleaged man - platitudinous,
nondescript - with a nondescript truck
will stop, offer help. She will not be seen
again. We shall not, as we do not, know.

18.9.83

Note

On the first day of the spring of 1983 a fourteen year-old girl named Kirsa Jensen disappeared after riding her horse to a section of coastline just south of Napier. Jensen was last seen at Awatoto Beach with a bloodied face, which she attributed to a fall from her horse, and in the company of a middle-aged man, who claimed to be waiting with her for her parents. Jensen's body has never been recovered, and her killer has never been identified.

Smithyman and his second wife Margaret Edgcumbe had spent a night in Napier in late August 1983, near the end of a journey through the middle latitudes of the North Island which took them to Taranaki, the Wairarapa, and the Ureweras as well as to Hawkes Bay. In 'Fiction Fact', which was written after the couple's return to Auckland, Smithyman remembers the uneasy night he spent in Napier, and finds in it premonitions of the tragedy about to strike the town.

In an interview with Jack Ross for the Smithymania issue of literary journal brief, Margaret Edgcumbe remembered that Kendrick often suffered from insomnia in his later years, and used to cope with this malady by reading deep into the night. In 'Fiction Fact', Smithyman's sleeplessness is reinforced by the noise from the railway workshop situated all too close to his 'not well chosen motel'.

The poet is obscurely troubled by the idea that the engines of the trains being repaired across the road were made in Bulgaria. In the early 1980s, Romania was widely regarded in the West as the most liberal of the Soviet Union's Eastern European allies, on account of its relatively independent foreign policy, and its neighbour Bulgaria was often perceived as a sinister, fiercely repressive place. Bulgaria's bad reputation derived partly from the closeness with which it followed Soviet foreign policy, but it also had something to do with the bizarre murder of Georgi Martov in London in 1978 by Bulgarian secret agents. Martov, a writer who had fled Bulgaria and become a prominent critic of its rulers, was killed by a tiny poison capsule fired out of an umbrella on a busy London street.

Smithyman wrote regularly about the Soviet bloc and the Cold War in the 1980s, thanks partly to the influence of his eldest son Christopher, a career diplomat who had begun, at the end of the 1970s, to specialise in Soviet affairs and to learn Russian. Christopher worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Wellington up until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1984, and on his occasional visits to that city Kendrick sometimes found himself chatting with diplomats from the Eastern bloc at parties and functions his son’s employers had organised.

In 'Fiction Fact' Bulgaria, with its Cold War connotations of espionage and repression, seems to remind Smithyman of books he has been reading to cope with his insomnia. After considering John Le Carre's novels about the Mi6 agent Smiley - a character sometimes described as the anti-Bond, on account of his dour demeanour and undramatic methods - Smithyman thinks of Rudyard Kipling, whose 1902 book Kim popularised the use of the term 'the Great Game' to describe the rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Kipling's novel relates the burgeoning career in espionage and the on-again, off-again spiritual quest of a young Englishman raised on the Indian subcontinent. At the book's end Kim must choose between finding enlightenment deep in the Himalayas or enjoying worldly success as a British intelligence officer.
If Kipling's novel counterposes spiritual purity to worldly corruption, then Graham Greene's fiction demolishes the dichotomy, showing that men of God can be as amoral as the most cynical spy. Greene's preoccupation with the darker side of humanity was not confined to the page: as his biographers have shown, the great writer consciously experimented, for much of his life, with acts which he knew to be evil, like spying on his friends for British intelligence. It is appropriate, then, that Greene, along with Kipling and Le Carre, suggests to Smithyman the 'talent' that 'evil has' for 'breaking/ any gloss of fiction, into fact'.

In the last dozen lines of his poem, Smithyman explains why he has been so preoccupied with dark thoughts. He and Margaret passed the site where Kirsa Jensen was last seen only a few days before her disappearance.

When Smithyman describes Awatoto Beach as a 'rivermouth...historically/ connected with missionary endeavour' he refers to the nineteenth century history of the place. In the early 1840s the Church Missionary Society established a station at Awatoto, which was then known as Awapuni, after acquiring ten acres near the mouth of the Tutaekuri River from a local hapu of the large Ngati Kahungungu iwi. The young William Colenso, who would eventually win renown as an ethnologist and a botanist as well as a clergyman, was the first occupant of the mission station, and in 1845 he and his followers managed to raise a church there.

For quarrelling Ngati Kahungungu hapu and, eventually, for members of other iwi, Awapuni became a neutral locus for negotiations and diplomatic intrigues. In the
1850s the great Tainui leader Wiremu Tamihana visited the place, during his efforts to win Ngati Kahungungu support for the King Movement he was creating. After the invasion of the King Movement's lands by the Pakeha government in Auckland in 1863, Awapuni was the site of negotiations between Ngati Kahungungu and semi-secret government agents keen to keep the iwi from joining the war on the side of King Tawhiao.

'Fiction Fact' is not a poem which constructs a logical argument, or a linear narrative: it proceeds, instead, by a series of unexpected associative leaps. Perhaps Smithyman is reminded of the intrigue-filled history of Awatoto by the spy novels he has apparently been reading, and perhaps the terrible mystery which surrounds the disappearance of Kirsa Jensen reminds him of the sinister secrets which are the stock in trade of spies and states.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Christopher Hitchens and the end of triumphalism

2011-12-23T15:49:00.029+13:00

As the American flag was lowered at Baghdad International Airport last week, the most vociferous literary proponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq lay dying in a Houston hospital. In the mass media and on the blogosphere there has been a curiously muted response to both the end of America's long occupation of Iraq and the passing of Christopher Hitchens.

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was vehemently criticised and defended around the world, and controversy persisted for the next few years, as the easy overthrow of Saddam Hussein was followed by widespread resistance to American-led forces, civil war between confessional groups, and economic collapse. Chistopher Hitchens had been a journalist and political commentator since he graduated from Oxford University in the early 1970s, but it was the support he gave, in print and in endless rounds of television talk show appearances and college hall debates, for Bush's attack on Iraq which made him into a celebrity and a hate figure in both his British homeland and his adopted America.

Hitchens had been a Trotskyist of sorts at Oxford, and had later associated with both the left of the British Labour Party and the ginger group of liberal American intellectuals which publishes the journal The Nation. By calling Bush's assault on Iraq a war of liberation, and by comparing its opponents to the appeasers of Hitler, Hitchens upset many of his old comrades and readers and delighted the right. His endorsement of Bush in the 2004 presidential elections only confirmed his apostasy.

In the early years of the Iraq war Hitchens was regularly excoriated by left-wing commentators, but few of his old opponents have felt the need to renew their fury in the aftermath of his death. The blogger Louis Proyect was one of Hitchens' most ferocious and persistent critics, but his obituary for his old enemy is surprisingly measured. Alex Callinicos, whose Socialist Workers Party was often condemned as an ally of 'Islamofascism' by Hitchens, has also refrained from denunciations.

The many articles published about the end of the American occupation of Iraq have had a similarly restrained tone. Long-time critics of Bush's war have been in a reflective rather than a strident mood.

If the end of the American war on Iraq and the death of that war's most passionate advocate have received muted responses, it is perhaps because Bush's war seems to belong to a different, distant era.

A decade ago, when Afghanistan had been speedily occupied and plans were being laid for an assault on Iraq, America was widely perceived as a dynamic and unstoppable superpower. The collapse of the Soviet Union had brought Eastern Europe into the American sphere of influence, and now, confronted by Bush's post-9/11 'for or against us' rhetoric and a massive military buildup, formerly recalcitrant parts of the Middle East and Central Asia seemed set to follow. Ideologues close to Bush talked about creating an 'American century', by using military firepower and free market economics to spread the writ of Washington into even the most barbarous corners of the globe.

The transformation of Iraq into an outpost of American capitalism and a model for the benighted parts of the world seemed, in this heady atmosphere, an easy task. Bush's deputy Dick Cheney predicted that the war on Iraq would be a 'cakewalk'; Hitchens gave victory a sort of teleological inevitability when he looked forward to the 'overdue liberation' of the country.

It is now obvious that the heady early years of this century marked the zenith of American imperial power and self-confidence. The adventure in Iraq ended up demonstrating the limits of American military capabilities, and the economic crisis that began on Wall Street in 2008 has shown up the fragility of the country's economy. Today not only the bomb-scarred streets of Baghdad but the ruined industrial zones of Detroit and Cleveland and the foreclosed suburbs of Stockton and Tampa mock the imperial hubris of the Bush era. To reread Hitchens' writings of a decade ago is to enter again the febrile atmosphere of the early years of the 'War on Terror'. Hitchens admitted to feeling a sense of 'exhilaration' in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, and his pro-war articles have a troubling excitement and confidence. After spending decades as a left-wing gadfly, with no influence in the centres of political and economic power, Hitchens felt that Bush's response to 9/11 had given him a cause with which he could identify wholeheartedly. The reformed Marxist's aggressive endorsements of Bush policies soon won him visits to the White House and meetings with neoconservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens even gave Bush and his inner circle a political pep talk on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens' excited response to the War on Terror sometimes expressed itself in a frank delight in violence. In a 2002 interview, for instance, he enthused over the effects of the cluster bombs American forces were dropping on the recalcitrant parts of Afghanistan:

If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops...then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, "Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through." No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words..

Hitchens' advertisements for Bush's war were written in haste, and without great regard for either facts or logic. Reviewing The Long Short War, a collection of twenty-two pro-war articles penned in late 2002 and early 2003, Norman Finkelstein noted how often Hitchens contradicted himself, even within the confines of a single article. Finkelstein found Hitchens claiming that the war had nothing to do with oil, then stating on his very next page that 'of course it's about oil'. He saw Hitchens arguing that Saddam's regime was on the brink of 'implosion', then asserting a page later than 'only the force of American arms' could bring regime change in Iraq.

While many early supporters of the war on Iraq either revised or abandoned their arguments as the war dragged on, Hitchens persisted with the same discredited talking points. Up until the end of his life he claimed, in the face of an avalanche of countervailing evidence, that Saddam had maintained a nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s, and had tried to buy uranium from Niger. In an interview with Radio New Zealand last year he repeated the lie that the Iraqi Communist Party and labour movement had supported the invasion of their country, neglecting to mention that the American 'liberators' had not only maintained but enforced a Saddam-era law banning trade unions and strikes.

What is important in Hitchens' pro-war writings is not evidence or logic but a rhetoric of destiny and triumphalism. In text after text, Hitchens gives the impression that the war in Iraq, and the War on Terror in general, are struggles of world-historical importance between forces of reaction and progress, and suggests that these struggles might be won or lost because of the bravery or cowardice of Western intellectuals. Hitchens treats critics of the War on Terror like unforgivable enemies, and presents himself as an auxillary of the American armed forces - a 'keyboard warrior', hunkered down in his Washington office-bunker.

Hitchens' delusions of self-importance are not novel, for anyone who has studied intellectual history. In the 1920s Ezra Pound decided that Mussolini was taking his advice; a decade later Martin Heidegger was stupid enough to believe that, by circulating his writings inside the Nazi Party, he was becoming Adolf Hitler's intellectual mentor, and guiding the progress of the 'new Germany'; in the 1960s Louis Althusser convinced himself that his office at the Ecole Normale was the secret centre of world revolution.

Hitchens responded to the failure of the American mission in Iraq by broadening rather than abandoning his vision of a world-historical battle between forces of good and evil, light and darkness. As Iraq fractured along confessional lines and support for Bush collapsed in America, Hitchens turned increasingly from the War on Terror to the notion of a wider war between religion and reason. In his 2007 book God is not Great he proclaimed religion an 'urgent danger' to the survival of the human race, and demanded a concerted struggle against it.

Hitchens' book won him support from some atheist organisations, but his penchant for violent rhetoric and his particular antipathy for Islam meant that the atheists sometimes came to regret inviting him to speak at their gatherings. The biologist and atheist PZ Myers described what happened after Hitchens took the stage at the 2007 Freedom from Religion convention in Wisconsin:

[I]t was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy...

The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties...Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again...I could tell that he did not have the sympathy of most of the audience at this point. There were a scattered few who applauded wildly at every mention of bombing the Iranians, but the majority were stunned into silence. People were leaving — I heard one woman sing a few bars of "Onward, Christian soldiers" as she left to mock his strategy.

Hitchens wrote a series of books which attempted to celebrate men he regarded as his precursors in the struggle against religion and other forms of unreason. But texts like Orwell's Victory and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: a biography are so poorly researched and constructed that they can only be considered assaults on reason. Hitchens' study of Paine piggybacks shamelessly on John Keane's biography of the great man, at times lifting whole paragraphs from its source; his homage to Orwell dispenses with secondary literature altogether, preferring unsubstantiated assertion to quote and citation. Just as Jim Morrison is only considered a great poet by folks who don't read poetry, so Hitchens is only acclaimed as a scholar by the right-wing ignoramuses who know him as an advocate for war on Fox News.

Abandoned by the left, Hitchens increasingly found a home on the hard right of American politics. He began to associate with David Horowitz, the famous defector from the 1960s left who had become an advocate of the deportation of American Muslims and the exclusion of socialist teachers from high school and colleges. Hitchens reviewed one of Horowitz's books sympathetically, spoke at one of the anti-Muslim rallies Horowitz regularly holds at American universities, and began a joint speaking tour with Horowitz before falling ill.

In the eighteen months it took to kill him, cancer took some of the hubris and aggression out of Hitchens' prose. Invalided away from the television talk shows and Washington cocktail parties which were his usual frontline, the keyboard warrior found himself writing about painkillers and chemotherapy and hospital gowns. The world-historical struggle for freedom was suddenly internalised, in prose that exchanged bombast for quiet irony:

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat...So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Hitchens tried to immortalise his writing by making it the servant of powerful men and a world-historical struggle, but it is the very personal work he produced at the end of his life which is most likely to persist in print. Like Pound's Fascist Cantos and Heidegger's rectorial addresses, the feverish advertisements for Bush's wars will be of interest only as examples of the dangers that power, or the illusion of power, poses for intellectuals.

Footnote: an academic paper I wrote back in 2005 about Hitchens and the rest of the 'pro-war left' can be read here.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

The expedition indoors

2011-12-21T00:32:00.018+13:00

Although the report Paul Janman recently sent south from Urupukapuka Island was full of interesting details and provocative speculations, I couldn't read it without feeling a little pained. I feel similarly uncomfortable when I read about older New Zealand adventurers, like William Colenso, the botanist and missionary whose jaunts around Te Ika a Maui are reenacted in new books by Peter Wells and my old friend the late Leicester Kyle. The likes of Colenso and Janman have been making me jealous. Skyler and I moved in the middle of this year to a suburb in the deep west of Auckland, and in recent weeks we - I use the word 'we' very loosely - have begun some renovations here, stripping layers off bedroom walls with an archaeological curiosity, and tearing up leagues of an ancient, peat-coloured carpet in the hope that there will be something solid underneath.

But the Waitakere Ranges rise on one side of our house, and whenever I think about the feats of travellers like Janman and Colenso I want to throw down my hammer or scraper and head for Waiatarua, or Ruaotuwhenua, or one of the other hills where antennae and bush grow.

As the likes of Jack Diamond and Lisa Truttman have reminded us, the Waitakeres have long been a place of refuge and adventure for Aucklanders tempted or forced to abandon city life. Bandits, deserters from imperialist war, and escaped prisoners have all made their ways to the ranges, along with visionary artists like Colin McCahon and Allen Curnow. There are a few research trails I'd like to follow through those hills.

I got a similar desire for flight back in the eighties at Drury Primary School whenever a teacher used to bang on about our area's association with Edmund Hillary. Looking through the Standard Three window past the last subdivisions of Auckland at the the dark blue Drury Hills, and hearing stories of our Ed's alpine daring, I was barely able to control the urge to rush out the classroom door and make for the south.

Skyler argues that living near the edge of the city can give us a certain mental balance, but I wonder whether it actually creates a peculiar sort of melancholy, by continually reminding us of the alternative to our quotidian suburban existences. Because I've been spending more time in hardware and furniture stores than in the countryside lately, I'm unable to respond in kind to Paul Janman's reports from pa sites and historic ruins and picturesquely isolated jetties. Instead, I thought I'd invoke the credo of Alf, and of anti-travel writing, by making the best of a bad situation, and glorifying the outwardly unedifying. In this poem, which I tried and failed to send to Paul yesterday (I suspect that he's once again drifted out of internet range, into one of Northland's serpentine harbours or estuaries), I deport William Colenso to twenty-first century suburbia.

In Defence of William Colenso's Botanical Expedition to a West Auckland branch of Target Furniture

Did you imagine him on a ridge-top,
chatting with cabbage trees,
or chin-deep in some bog
where kahikatea strain the sunlight?

Have you forgotten the forests
in this city?

Have you forgotten the rooms
full of rimu tables,
the oak cabinets varnished
with kauri gum?
Don't you remember
those spiders and dragonflies writhing
in blebs of gold?

Have you forgotten the library
archives, their piles of paper rising
like puriri trunks?

The deepest woods
the best specimens
are always indoors!

To reach the specimens
in the storeroom of this shop
Colenso climbs the staircase
like a tree.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Anti-travel in Urupukapuka: a communication from Paul Janman

2011-12-20T12:14:00.014+13:00

[Some folks have been testing the water in rather more glamorous locations than Henderson...]

Hi Scott,

I'm sitting on an oyster-scabbed boat ramp, which is the only place we can get an internet signal here. The sun is kissing two old Pa sites standing up like a pair of green tits on the other side of Otehei Bay. Urupukapuka Island is ripe for anti-travel...the locals however are innocent of the precepts of the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island...this island has been an archaeological goldmine, and is now infested with legions of red, yellow and white 'dolphin-watching' tour boats. A helicopter dragonflied down here yesterday, and disgorged half a dozen gawpers.

In 1772 Marion du Fresne spotted a fortification on the hill above us, stopped to talk to the locals, and built his hospital in neighbouring Moturoa. He was knocked off not long afterwards. There is also a story about the restaurant here, built by Zane Grey, writer of novels set in an idealised American West. The restaurant burned down in suspicious circumstances: I am needling recalcitrant locals about the probable arson. I found a 1972 history textbook among the crap novels here at the bach. One of the photos in the textbooks shows soldiers at work on the Great South Road in 1863. I suspect it was taken by William Temple, a man who marched south into the Waikato carrying primitive image-making equipment - collodion wet plates and all that - as well as a rifle. Temple won a Victoria Cross at Rangiriri, and took 'technically imperfect' photos which seem now to have a blurred, layered, almost proto-cinematic quality. Our Great South Road film should finish (ie, reverse) his work. The kids are rioting...pj

My walk to Mocha

2011-12-15T18:24:00.059+13:00

Fifty years ago West Aucklanders still swam in the long, rock-edged pools of the Opanuku, one of half a dozen large creeks which flow east from the Waitakere Ranges into the Waitemata Harbour. Today a sprawling 'aquatic complex' called West Wave stands in central Henderson, just a few metres from one of the formerly popular swimming spots on the Opanuku. Instead of sharing the dirty creek water with ducks and beer cans, locals can take their pick of West Wave's covered, chlorinated, heated pools.

I am visiting West Wave in an attempt to keep the terms of a vague exercise programme devised to help me manage a chronic injury in my left arm. Emerging nervously from a changing room, I strap what looks like a fisherman's float to my midriff, descend a stainless steel ladder into the placid water, position myself between thick black lane markings painted on off-white tiles, and begin the sort of slow, exaggerated walk which John Cleese made famous forty years ago in a series of Monty Python sketches. My knees rise to hip-height, my arms make the shape of cresting waves, and my feet float a few inches from the tiles, as I begin my slow progress to the far end of the pool, fifty metres away.

In the lane beside me an impressively large man has begun what seems like a parody of my waterwalk. He dips his head as he strides forward through the water, and as his left knee rises towards his midriff his quadruple chin and supersized belly touch for a moment. Surely I can't look quite as ridiculous as him?

I wonder about the training routine that my neighbour must have followed, year after year, decade after decade, to reach his present condition. I imagine him sprawled on couches or propped up in armchairs, gutting packet after packet of potato chips with a sort of joyless industry; I see him rising early on a Monday morning and heading to McDonalds or Burger King before work, in the way a lesser man might head to the gym.

I notice that my neighbour has a smile on his face, as he sloshes onward through foaming water, and I remember Paul Theroux's claim that very large people love the water - love swimming, and diving, and lolling in the shallows of lagoons - because it frees them from the weight of their bodies. Perhaps we all seek a similar escape when we enter the water - even if our bodies are not enormously overweight, they find ways to discipline us, with their aches and spasms and tiresome fealty to gravity. As a young man, Arthur C Clarke become obsessed with the idea of weightlessness, and looked forward to the advent of space flight. Frustrated by the failure of NASA and its Soviet rival to develop cheap and easy interstellar travel, the middle-aged Clarke donned diving gear instead of an astronaut's suit, and spent thousands of hours space walking in the warm seas off Sri Lanka.

As I get further down the pool, opening up a modest lead over my panting, splashing neighbour, I can observe a group of young men, kitted out in dark blue goggles and light blue speedos, limbering up on the poolside tiles. Like all serious swimmers, they have huge jutting chests mounted on slender lower torsos. They remind me of the Ford Escorts with transplanted V8s under their hoods that jounce up and down Lincoln Road on Friday nights.

A huge screen hanging ahead of me, above the far end of the pool, shows a series of images - an unsettled sea at dawn or dusk, a flat-topped skerry loaded with gannets, a creek cutting a course through ironsand...The dozen or so photos are shown again and again, in the same order. I wonder whether they are meant as some commercial or educational advertisement, but none of them is adorned by either an explanatory text or a logo, and I decide that they are an attempt to ennoble the swimmers and dogpaddlers and waterwalkers of West Wave, by connecting these placid, chlorinated, weatherproof pools to the wild western coastline of Auckland, with its black sand beaches, backbreaking surf, and scores of wrecked ships. Staring at the images, I start to imagine myself treading the swell of Whatipu, as the Orpheus sinks into a hole in the sandbar on the Manukau Harbour entrance, or bodysurfing ashore at Karekare with Allen Curnow.

One of the screen's photos shows a island - is it a skerry off Muriwai, or is it Ihumoana, the overgrown Kawerau a Maki pa that floats beside the northern end of Bethells Beach? - in the middle distance, listing into a high sea. As I slosh my way towards the end of the pool I see the island again and again, and realise that it looks a little like the pictures I have seen of the place Chilean maps call Isla Mocha.

Despite or because of its isolation from Chile's coast by more than fifty kilometres of cold choppy water, Mocha has had a long and complicated human history. The Lafkenche tribe of the pre-Columbian Mapuche nation called the island Amuchra, or Resurrection of Souls, because they believed that the spirits of their ancestors resided there. Earthworks and artefacts suggest that at least some Mapuche settled on Amuchra before their deaths. Francis Drake and many later adventurers used Mocha as a depot and haven, and in 1839 a whaler named Jeremiah Reynolds published a book called Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific, which recounted his duels with an albino sperm whale in the waters off the island. A young man named Herman Melville read Reynold's book excitedly. Today eight hundred people, a few of them Mapuche, live on Mocha's fifty square kilometres. Over the last few years Isla Mocha has begun to fascinate archaeologists. In 2007 the University of Auckland's Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith examined a series of skulls from Mocha in a provincial Chilean museum, and realised that they had markedly Polynesian characteristics. Matisoo-Smith also came across chicken bones excavated on Mocha in 1934, and a series of adzes. The adzes looked Polynesian, and DNA tests showed that the chicken probably came from one of the islands far to the west of Mocha. Matisoo-Smith's discoveries created a media sensation overseas - the New Scientist reported them under the headline 'Polynesians beat Columbus to the Americas' - but were barely acknowledged in Aotearoa.

Mocha is an important setting for Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World, a collection of essays by Matisoo-Smith and a dozen other scholars from New Zealand, Chile, and the United States published this year by Altamira Press. In his contribution to the book, veteran University of Auckland archaeologist Geoffrey Irwin argues that ancient Polynesian visitors to the continent now known as South America would most likely have travelled from Rapa Nui, riding a wind that blows from the edge of a high pressure system which often hangs over the far eastern Pacific. But Irwin goes on to make the startling suggestion that the journey could have been made from the Chatham Islands, across ten thousand kilometres of sub-Antarctic ocean. A voyage from the Chathams to Chile would have seen the double-rigged sailing ships of the Polynesians confronted by freezing thirty-foot waves for at least four months, but the similarities between adzes found on the Chathams and on Mocha suggest that it might have been possible. Did some of the group of early Maori who landed on the Chathams in the twelfth or thirteenth century decide to press east, in search of warmer and more arable islands, and find themselves driven further and further across a stormy and barren ocean? Did a few of them eventually land on Mocha and establish settlements there, intermarrying with the local people, while the whanau they had left behind on the Chathams began slowly to adapt to their bleak home, and to evolve the culture we call Moriori?

Certainly, no sailor who followed latitude 44 east from the Chathams would sight even the meanest fragment of land until he or she reached the coast of Chile, or the small islands like Mocha which lie close to that coast.

In 1843 Asaph Taber, the captain of a whaling ship named the Maria-Theresa, sighted an island or reef about seven hundred kilometres east of the Chathams. The discovery soon began to appear on maps of the Pacific, where it was usually called either Tabor Island or Maria-Theresa Reef, and Jules Verne used it as the setting for two of his novels, In Search of the Castaways and The Mysterious Island. In the twentieth century, though, repeated searches, including one by the New Zealand naval vessel Tui, failed to locate Tabor Island. A couple of other nineteenth century 'discoveries' in the same area, Ernest Lagouve Reef and Wachusett Reef, have proved similarly elusive. The route from the Chathams to Chile may be bereft of islands, but it is frequented by icebergs, which are sometimes hundreds of metres wide and scores of metres high. Is it possible that Asaph Taber glimpsed a distant berg, perhaps through mist or rain, and decided that anything so imposing could not possibly have floated to its present location, or be doomed to dissolve into water?

My mind has been drifting from Henderson's public swimming pool to the roaring forties and to Isla Mocha. Skyler suggested that I should daydream - "set imaginative goals" was her phrase, I think - while I exercise, as a way of measuring my progress. "Count your lengths" she said, "and see if you can do twenty. That's a trip to the shops and back."

Perhaps the sterility of the environments in which modern humans exercise and the repetitive nature of the 'scientific' fitness regimes created by physiotherapists and personal trainers force exercisers into fantasy. As we do lengths, or run laps, or move from one humming exercise machine to another in vast gyms, we become, for an hour or so at least, prisoners. Our bodies are trapped, and our bored brains rebel. An acquaintance of mine revealed that he imagines he is running through a teeming, dripping tropical rainforest in Borneo whenever he uses the treadmill at his gym; another sometimes pretends that he is wielding a broadsword in medieval battle when he swings his tennis racket. Aren't the images West Wave shows to its guests on that huge hanging screen an admission that fantasy is inevitable, in a place like this?

Skyler's talk of imaginary journeys to the local shops somehow reminded me of a strange trek made by one of the twentieth century's most unpleasant men. After being given a twenty year prison sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, Albert Speer decided to defy the guards and administrators of Spandau Prison by walking around the world. Speer marked out a route of a few hundred yards through the prison's exercise yard and around its dusty garden, then calculated the distance that he would cover on a walk from Germany through Poland, the Soviet Union, and the far East, across North America, and through Western Europe back to Berlin. After arriving at a sum of miles, Speer began to walk laps of the track he had made through the Spandau grounds. While his fellow prisoners spent their exercise time smoking and arguing about the war, Speer walked mile after mile. He went to Spandau's library and borrowed books - travel books, but also treatises on history and botany - which dealt with the nations he was walking through, so that he could visualise their landscapes and inhabitants. Every night Speer described his journey in the massive diary he kept at Spandau.

Speer is a troubling historical character - a capable and devious man, he was responsible for the deadly slave labour scheme that kept Germany's economy functioning dring the last year of World War Two, yet he was able to pass himself off, at the Nuremberg Trials and in books like Spandau: the Secret Diaries, as the 'good Nazi', who disapproved of the bloodlust and anti-semitism of Hitler and was happy to see the downfall of the Third Reich. Speer was the only Nazi to plead guilty at Nuremberg, and in his writings, at least, he accepted his long prison sentence as just punishment for his role in the Nazi government. But how can his epic walk not be interpreted as a symbolic rejection of his confinement, and of the authority of his captors?

There are unsettling parallels, too, between parts of Speer's journey and some of the events of the Nazi era. As Speer describes his imaginary march across the steppe of the Soviet Union, for instance, the reader of the Spandau diaries remembers that millions of Germans made a real march in that direction only a few years earlier.

And yet there is perhaps something admirable in Speer's dogged and eccentric walk. His ability to escape imaginatively from Spandau may impress us, even as it disturbs us.

As I turn to begin my second lap, I decide that I will walk across the Pacific to Isla Mocha, length by length of this clean heated pool. The distance from the Chathams to Mocha is ten thousand kilometres, and the distance from Auckland to the Chathams, when obstacles like the Coromandel peninsula and the Raukumara Mountains are acknowledged and avoided, is perhaps about two thousand kilometres. If this pool is fifty metres long - one-twentieth of a kilometre - then the journey to Mocha should take, I calculate, about two hundred and forty thousand lengths. Skyler suggested that I do twenty lengths every time I visit the pool, and if I can fill this quota twice a week them it should take me a mere fourteen years to arrive in Mocha.

Fourteen years might seem, I admit, a long time, but epic journeys are not supposed to be brief, easy affairs, like walks to the shops. And as the years pass and I get closer to my goal, covering league after league of cold empty sea, I can borrow books from the local library - journals of explorer-blunderers like Cook and Drake, novels like Moby Dick and The Chambered Nautilus, and scholarly treatises on ice floes and hypothermia - so that these chlorinated waters can become, in my imagination, epic and sub-Antarctic.

The water around me already seems colder, and perhaps a little more turbulent, as I slog excitedly to the other end of the pool, and turn to do my third lap, eyeing the image of Isla Mocha on the big screen. Before I can get much further, though, one of the big-chested young men from the pool's fast lanes surfaces in front of me, and touches me on the shoulder. "Mate, do you mind packing it in for while? We've got heats, and we've booked all these lanes for the next half hour." I wonder if I look dismayed, because he adds, in a friendlier voice, "You don't have to go home. You can have a coffee and a pie in the cafe in the foyer. It's only for half an hour."

I want to tell this impertinent intruder that I am not some saggy-stomached bloke walking awkwardly through the water with the help of a flourescent flotation device, but rather an adventurer beginning an epic journey, through icy precipitous seas, to the island of Mocha. I want to ask him why his swimming club's trivial races should be prioritised over my great endeavour. Instead of replying to the young man, though, I dogpaddle obediently to the stainless steel ladder at the edge of my lane, and climb quietly out of the water.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Overdubs and images

2011-12-12T13:29:00.008+13:00

It's perhaps not surprising that 'Free as a Bird' doesn't make it into many lists of the Beatles' greatest moments. The song features a nicely tremulous vocal from John Lennon, has a pleasant enough melody, and ends with one of those psychedelic rushes of backwards guitar George Martin was so good at engineering, but it wasn't even able to sneak in to Rolling Stone magazine's selection of the hundred best Beatles compositions.

For most Beatles fans, the circumstances in which 'Free as a Bird' was created make it a somewhat suspect artefact. Lennon recorded an acoustic demo of the song in the late '70s, and in the early '90s, more than a decade after his death, McCartney, Starr, Harrison, and Martin holed up in a studio and added layer after layer of overdubs. The result may sound nice, but it lacks a certain authenticity. Would Lennon, with his legendary capacity for self-criticism, ever have allowed the release of his song? And would the man who recorded Plastic Ono Band in a couple of chaotic days have approved of the elaborate embellishments his former bandmates gave to his demo?

I suspect that the 'collaboration' I make with Kendrick Smithyman in my new book Feeding the Gods suffers from some of the same problems as 'Free as a Bird'. With the approval of Smithyman's literary executioner Margaret Edgcumbe and the support of Creative New Zealand, I paired my poems with a series of black and white photos Smithyman snapped on his journeys through New Zealand in the 1970s and '80s. I think the photos look great, but I'm a long-time Smithymaniac, and the man himself isn't around to disagree with my selection, or the juxtapositions I've created. The newly-minted Australian literary journal Jacket2 features a rather less dubious collaboration between visual art and poetry. Jack Ross has made a selection of work by twelve contemporary Kiwi poets for Jacket2, and illustrated his selections with paintings by Emma Smith. Unlike John Lennon or Kendrick Smithyman, Emma Smith is very much alive, and I'm reassured to know that she consented to the coupling of her painting Lead with my poems 'Elegy for a Survivor of the War on Afghanistan' and 'Walking to the Dendroglyphs on Christmas Eve'.

Last year Emma took exception to my review of an exhibition she held at a former mental hospital in Auckland's inner western suburb of Point Chevalier. She didn't appreciate being portrayed as a wild-eyed outsider artist obsessed with morbid German Expressionist masters like Munch, and in a second post about her show I conceded some of her points, and suggested a different way of approaching her work.

While many of the paintings Emma was showing in the middle of 2010 did at least suggest the influence of Expressionism, with their deformed, shadowy figures, Lead is, to my eyes at least, a more abstract work, showing a fragment of blue surrounded and cut in half by black. The work's restricted palette and bold, almost violent brushstrokes give it an intensity which is both unnerving and thrilling.

Some of the recent posts on Emma's blog Tin Grew show that she can use abstraction in gentler ways. An untitled work uploaded on the 21st of October, for instance, features subtle shades of green, and an ambiguous central shape which reminds me a little of the opening in Jackson Pollock's luminously mysterious late painting The Deep.

Footnote: For the record, here's my Beatles top ten:

1. Your Mother Should Know
2. Rain
3. Because
4. You Won't See Me
5. Sexy Sadie
6. I'm Only Sleeping
7. She's Leaving Home
8. Norwegian Wood
9. Within You Without You
10.She Said She Said

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Boarding the Ark

2011-12-07T13:23:00.047+13:00

The high-ceilinged white rooms of Artspace are inhospitable at the best of times, but they seemed particularly vast and bleak last week, because some fastidious cleaner or ferociously minimalist curator had emptied the Karangahape Road gallery of the dour installations it normally holds. The New Zealand Film Archive lodges in the same building as Artspace, and seems to share its neighbour's frosty way with design. After turning up to the Archive to watch a preview of Paul Janman's feature-length documentary Tongan Ark, I was ushered into a room with walls so pale they seemed to glow, even after lights had been dimmed and Paul's film had begun to play. The images in the opening frames of Tongan Ark - a wave sloshing on a reef, coconut trees leaning into a tropical wind, schoolkids chasing pigs through a plot of taro - were so warm and sensuous that they seemed in danger of melting the room that held them.

Made for a mere thirty thousand dollars, half of which was provided by Creative New Zealand, Janman's film is a study of Futa Helu, Tonga's most famous intellectual, and the 'Atenisi Institute, the penurious but profoundly influential private university Helu founded in 1966. As a student at the University of Auckland in the early noughties Janman met 'Okusi Mahina, a Tongan anthropologist with a patriarch's beard, a villager orator's deep voice, and a passion for the nose flute. Mahina had begun his serious education at 'Atenisi, and he told Janman and his other students the story of the institution and its founder.

Mahina explained that Futa Helu had been a brilliant young man from the island of Foa, in Tonga's Ha'apai archipelago, when he was sent to the University of Sydney in the 1950s. In Sydney Helu soon formed a bond with John Anderson, a maverick ex-Trotskyist philosopher with a liking for controversy and a love of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

After returning to Tonga in the early '60s Helu disappointed the country's elite by refusing to take a prestigious government job. Instead, he founded a kava circle in the capital Nuku'alofa, where he discoursed with curious locals about Greek philosophy and Tongan politics. Away from the kava bowl Helu tutored young Tongans in subjects as different as mathematics and English, and it was with the help of these students that he raised a set of classrooms on the swampy western outskirts of Nuku'alofa.

After hearing about Helu's dream of fusing Polynesian and European cultures, and learning about the idealistic young men and women who had left well-funded Western universities to earn subsistence wages teaching and studying with the great man, Paul Janman knew that he had to make his own journey to 'Atenisi.

When he arrived in Nuku'alofa to begin a stint at 'Atenisi, though, Janman was puzzled and disappointed. There was no committee to greet him at the gates of the school, and no obvious curriculum for him to teach.

Over the coming weeks and months, as he submitted to the rhythms and rituals of 'Atenisi life, drinking kava with other staff members, discussing Heraclitus and the problems of Tongan society with Futa Helu under a banyan tree, and reading and rereading the small selection of books in the university's humid library, Janman began to understand the way 'Atenisi worked, and the role it had come to play in Tongan life. Like his Greek heroes, Futa Helu was a thinker nourished by a pre-industrial society, a society which lacked the modern distinctions between work and leisure, public and private life, and the arts and the sciences. Like Socrates or Plato, Helu had turned his life into a series of relaxed yet earnest dialogues. He saw disagreement and critique as an essential route to human progress. New employees, eager students, journalists, pro-democracy activists, trade unionists, and Tongan royals all came to the door of his shabby office, or sat down at his kava circle, but anyone who asked him easy questions or sought from him soundbite-sized quotes was invariably disappointed.

As a devotee of Heraclitus, the philosopher of change and bewilderment, Helu had little enthusiasm for definitive answers and snappy slogans. As an advocate of dialogue between Western and Tongan cultures and pre-modern and modern ideas, he had a vested interest in upsetting, or at least complicating, the presuppositions of pushy palangi journalists and smug Tongan nobles.

Under Helu's watch, 'Atenisi became an island within an island, a zone of freedom for both palangi intellectuals tired of the commercialisation and instrumentalisation of Western universities and for young Tongans - dropouts, artists, enemies of the monarchy, petty criminals - unable to accept unquestioningly the hierarchies and regulations of their society. Paul Janman's years at 'Atenisi changed both his thinking and his teaching. The highly structured, meticulously argued essays he had written at the University of Auckland gave way to freer, more meditative texts, which were sometimes written in verse as well as prose. Janman grew accustomed to teaching outside as well as inside the classroom, so that he might find himself helping his students hang out their washing or feed their pigs at the same time that he helped them analyse Don Quixote or Moby Dick.

In Tongan Ark, Janman tries to share with us the bewilderment he felt during his first weeks and months at 'Atenisi, as well as the appreciation he gradually developed for the place. The opening twenty minutes of the film offer us a jumble of impressions, as we arrive at 'Atenisi and are given a brusque tour of the institution. We see staff members giggling around a table in a run-down room, as they discuss some aspect of an impenetrable curriculum. We watch students gathering outside a classroom, and try to decipher their strange patois, which mixes African-American slang with Tongan phrases and pieces of the old-fashioned version of English still taught in Tongan primary and secondary schools. We see skinny dogs patrolling the rutted road that leads to 'Atenisi, a pig roasting over a fire in the school grounds, and staff sipping kava. We see an elderly Futa Helu, wedged between a Greek vase and what looks like a polystyrene copy of one of the pillars of the Parthenon, explaining that as he "gets older" he "goes back more and more to the old Greeks" for inspiration. We wonder how the film is going to bring these fragments together. In the short talk he gave to introduce Tongan Ark, Janman explained that he had tried to organise his movie not with a linear narrative or a logical argument but "around a series of paradoxes". Such a structure is, Janman suggested, appropriate to the dialogic practice of Futa Helu and his Greek progenitors.

And, sure enough, after its chaotic first twenty minutes, Tongan Ark presents us with a series of contradictions. We see Helu proclaiming, in the midst of the dilapidated campus he built, that philosophy is "a search for permanence", and then observe him quoting Heraclitus' dictum that nothing is constant except change. We hear Helu calling for the fusion of Greek and Polynesian cultures, and then observe him presiding over one of 'Atenisi's ebullient graduation ceremonies, where he warns his audience not to begin a Tongan dance until a performance of Western classical music has finished. "Let's do European things the European way, then Tongan things the Tongan way", snaps the irritated prophet of cross-cultural exchange, as the graduands sitting behind him giggle. We see Helu gravely describing Dutch culture, with its penchant for order and efficiency, as "problematic", before praising the contribution that Kek, a bearded, long-haired Dutch mathematician with a taste for extravagant earrings and bright dresses, has made as a teacher at 'Atenisi. We asked not to resolve but to ponder these paradoxes.

The structure of Tongan Ark may owe as much to Polynesian culture as to Heraclitean paradox. Despite his passion for Greece, Futa Helu was a deeply Polynesian thinker, whose knowledge of Tongan dance, music, poetry and tapa saw him act as an advisor to everyone from ethnologists doing research in the villages of Tongatapu to state administrators planning the elaborate dances and feasts which accompany the coronations of Tongan Kings.

As Helu himself notes more than once in his essays and talks, there is a non-linear quality to much Polynesian literature and art. Polynesian oral traditions feature culture heroes and recurring symbolic deeds, not historical characters and discrete events. Polynesian religions emphasised the circular nature of time, not the inevitable end of time beloved of Abrahamic faiths. 'Okusi Mahina tried to sum up Tongan ways of seeing the world and its history when he said that his people "walk forward into the past and backwards into the future at the same time".

Both palangi and indigenous film makers have struggled to find ways of representing the special quality of much Polynesian art and thought. In the fascinating notebook he kept during the making of Tangata Whenua, the 1977 series that brought Maori history and tradition to New Zealand television screens for the first time, a young Michael King explained that he had learned to 'discard notions of time and relevance', and instead approach his subject matter in 'slow concentric circles'. Janman's abandonment of conventional narrative and argument means that Tongan Ark arguably operates in a similar manner, returning repeatedly to the same people and the same topics, so that they gradually become more comprehensible.

The first time we watch Futa Helu laud the ancient Greeks his enthusiasm seems peculiar to us, given his position as the head of a struggling school on a small island in Western Polynesia; by the time he returns to the subject much later in the movie, we have come to appreciate the similarities between ancient Greece and agrarian Tonga, and the parallels between Helu's love of dialogue and the practice of garrulous Greek controversialists like Socrates and Diogenes. We learn not treat Helu's sometimes gnomic, sometimes outrageous statements not as isolated propositions, but as moments in an ongoing meditation.

Our understanding of 'Atenisi's students also grows as Tongan Ark unfolds. As Janman's camera moves through the plantations of Tongatapu and the suburbs of Nuku'alofa, panning disconsolately from the shacks of the poor to the vast residences of royals and church ministers, we come to appreciate the complex, overlapping worlds which young Tongans are expected to navigate in the twenty-first century. We realise that their eclectic vocabularies and varied mannerisms are a response to the demands of living in a society where different moral codes and modes of production contend.

Despite its meandering pace and sometimes abstruse digressions, Tongan Ark relays an urgent message. The film shows how Futa Helu repeatedly contrasted the 'critical education' offered at 'Atenisi with the 'education for submissiveness' which he perceived in many Pacific schools and universities. Helu was an inveterate critic of both the church-run high schools of Tonga, which he regarded as little more than indoctrination centres, and the University of the South Pacific, which he considered far too interested in the economic outcomes of learning.

American sociologist Michael Horowitz, who was the Director of 'Atenisi from 2008 until 2010, expands on Helu's points when he condemns the 'commercial' mindset of Western societies and the business-driven curricula of many Western universities. Horowitz, who studied with Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and was involved in the left-wing counterculture of that era, sees 'Atenisi as an oasis of critical thinking and anti-materialism. He thinks that the problems which have beset Helu's university - discrimination from both Tongan governments and Western universities, criticism from Tongan royals and church leaders, the indifference of the increasing numbers of young middle class Tongans who see education only as a route to wealth - are the inevitable consequences of "swimming against a strong stream".

The eeriest of the paradoxes in Tongan Ark occurs near the middle of the film, where Heraclitus' vision of fire as the essential element of the universe, and therefore as a force for creation as well as destruction, is juxtaposed with Janman's footage of the blazes which destroyed most of downtown Nuku'alofa on the
16th of November 2006, when a pro-democracy protest by young Tongans turned into a deadly riot. Tongans talk about '16/11' in the same fearful, bewildered tones that Americans use to discuss the events of the September the 11th, 2001. In Tongan Ark, a number of 'Atenisians cite the torching of central Nuku'alofa as evidence that a mixture of capitalist globalisation and authoritarian tradition have created a profound political and social crisis in Tonga. The thought of Futa Helu, with its critique of both unrestrained capitalism and unreasoning tradition, and its attempt to find a balance between Western and Polynesian ways of life, is offered as an antidote to Tonga's problems. But Janman never makes his attitude to the riot of 16/11 explicit, and it is possible to interpret his film's references to Heraclitean fire as suggestions that the events of that day were somehow necessary and regenerative. After his film had ended, Janman was joined by 'Okusi Mahina and Michael Horowitz, and the three men invited questions from the audience, which included many 'Atenisi graduates as well as a number of palangi artists and intellectuals. After several former students of Futa Helu had paid tribute to the man, Mahina made a long statement which included both praise and criticism of his old mentor. Noting the title of Paul Janman's movie, Mahina called Helu the "Noah of Tonga". Like Noah, Helu had constructed, in the face of widespread mockery, a vessel which was capable of rescuing his compatriots from the "high waters" of chaos and irrationality. Mahina noted with a chuckle that the analogy with Noah was especially appropriate, because of Helu's role in helping raise and maintain the buildings on 'Atenisi's campus. More than once Professor Helu had taken advantage of a break between lectures to climb a ladder and hammer a few nails into a creaking roof!

But Mahina went on to argue that Helu and some of his proteges - the anthropologist Opeti Taliai, for example, who appears several times in Tongan Ark - have at times been too uncritical of the Western intellectual tradition, and insufficiently attentive to Tongan ways of interpreting the world. Mahina was sceptical about the claim, made several times in Janman's movie, that Tongan notions of tapu were designed to protect the power of the country's religious and political elites. Mahina suggested that this interpretation of tapu reflects the crude functionalism of Eurocentric anthropology, rather than a real understanding of Tongan society. He argued that the distinctions tapu makes - between clean and unclean objects, sacred and profane places, and so on - were ways in which Tongans "constituted their reality". Tapu offered, in other words, a way of making sense of the natural and human worlds, by dividing and regulating their manifold details. It had not been not, Mahina insisted, a mere political ploy. Mahina's criticisms of Helu reflect the sustained effort he has made to differentiate his thought from that of his old teacher. Over the last decade or so Mahina has gradually developed what he calls the 'ta va theory of space and time', which aims to fuse concepts drawn from traditional Tongan culture with elements of Western philosophical tradition. A dozen or so PhD students have been busying themselves deploying the ta va theory in their research, and some of them accompanied Mahina to the preview of Tongan Ark. Opeti Taliai, who is reportedly holed up in the countryside north of Auckland writing a huge book about Tongan history, dissents from some of the key tenets of the ta va theory. Taliai had agreed to come to the preview of Janman's film, but was forced to withdraw from the event at the last minute.

The Kiwi classicist Ted Jenner has suggested that the fragmentation of the 'Atenisians school of thought parallels the diffusion of ancient Greek intellectual movements - of the Pythagoreans, for instance - in the aftermath of their founders' deaths. Perhaps the fragmentation of an intellectual movement is a sign not of weakness but of dynamism, and of a healthy hostility to dogma.

In a typically long-winded contribution to the discussion that followed the showing of Tongan Ark, I argued that, whatever the ultimate fate of 'Atenisi University, thinkers like Helu, Mahina, and Taliai deserve to be studied outside as well as inside Tongan society. Just as intellectuals like Marcuse and Benjamin transcended their connection to the bricks and mortar of the Frankfurt Institute, so the 'Atenisians have an importance which transcends the institution Helu founded. With their dream of fusing Polynesian and European cultures, their opposition to both hidebound tradition and globalised capitalism, and their rejection of commercially driven education, the 'Atenisi thinkers have much to teach us in the twenty-first century.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Cunliffe or Shearer for Pope?

2011-12-04T00:25:00.027+13:00

In Michael Anderson's classic thriller The Shoes of the Fisherman, delegates from around the world gather at the Vatican to elect a new Pope. Although it occurs amidst a global economic and political crisis, the election is conducted in secret. While cardinals and bishops debate theological and political issues and cast ballots in one of the Vatican's ornate halls, crowds of Catholics mill about in the square outside, waiting for their new leader to appear on a balcony and announce his name.

The New Zealand Labour Party's leadership election reminds me of the strange process documented in The Shoes of the Fisherman.

Labour is clearly in crisis, having just seen its vote drop to a level not seen since the 1920s, and grassroots party activists - the sort of folks who will never be MPs, but who nevertheless go door-knocking in the rain during election campaigns, and sell raffle tickets at the local markets week after week, year after year - are wondering whether the leader who succeeds Phil Goff will be able to revive the organisation's fortunes. Recent discussion at Labour-linked blogs like The Standard has revolved around the question of leadership.

Like those Catholics in Vatican Square, though, Labour's grassroots members are locked out of the contest for the leadership of their organisation. They can watch the contestants debate each other on television, and they may be able to ask one or both of them a question at the public meetings being held in a few major centres, but they can't cast a vote for their party's leader. Only Labour's members of parliament get that privilege.

The contestants in Labour's leadership election are almost as mysterious as the robed men who vie for the Papacy in The Shoes of the Fisherman. David Cunliffe and David Shearer may have been all over the media for the past week or so, but neither has deigned to discuss in any detail either his political philosophy or the policy programme he favours for Labour.

Shearer and Cunliffe have confined themselves to repeating cliches about 'rejuvenating' and 'bringing together' the party, and 'taking New Zealand forward'. Although some political commentators have identified Cunliffe with the 'left' of the party and Shearer with a 'right' faction, no platforms or manifestos have been produced, and most Labour MPs are refusing even to say which candidate they support.

It is interesting to compare this rather miserable leadership election with the internal politics of some of Labour's sister parties. Nearly twenty years of domination by Tony Blair and his clique of spin doctors and technocrats saw the British Labour Party lose much of its internal life, but the organisation was still able to hold a democratic contest to choose a new leader after the election defeat it suffered last year. Five candidates representing various ideological nuances of the party toured the country, arguing about issues like the global financial crisis and the Iraq War in packed halls. Although uber-Blairite David Miliband had the backing of the media and much of the Labour establishment, tens of thousands of grassroots members cast their ballots for his brother Ed, who had tried to present himself as the post-Blair, anti-war candidate.

The Australian Labor Party also appears to have a positively healthy internal life, in comparison to its sibling in this country. This weekend's national conference of the Aussie party has been full of loud debate about issues as different gay marriage and cuts in the federal budget, with remits flying from the left and the right of the organisation. A greater contrast with the decorous, stage-managed, extraordinarily tedious conferences of New Zealand Labour could hardly be imagined.

Labour loyalists might argue that, even if the New Zealand party's leadership election is pathetically at odds with its constitution's commitment to 'democratic socialism', the most important thing is to unite behind the leader the election will produce, so that John Key can be pushed out of office in 2014. But Labour's atrophied internal life is connected in important ways to its poor showing in the recent election, and its poor prospects for 2014.

The global economic crisis which began in 2008 has revived old debates about whether governments should stimulate depressed economies by putting more money into the hands of workers and the poor or whether they should instead try to cut state spending. In the early 1930s the latter approach was tried by the likes of Herbert Hoover in America and the Forbes government here in New Zealand, with disastrous results. By the end of the decade social democratic governments dedicated to stimulating the economy had been elected in many countries. In New Zealand the Labour Party won a landslide election victory in 1935, and immediately set about pouring money into the economy by boosting pensions and building thousands of state houses.

Along with the leaders of many Western nations, John Key has chosen to ignore the lessons of history and obey the dictates of big business by responding to the new economic crisis with tax and spending cuts. The result is a deepening recession.

But instead of countering Key's doomed policies with an unequivocal commitment to stimulating the economy, Labour offered voters a very mixed message during the recent election campaign. Labour put forward some solidly left-wing policies, like a proposal to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. When Key tried to argue that a rise in the minimum wage would create unemployment, Phil Goff quite correctly pointed out that it would actually create more jobs, because it would see more money being spent in shops and flowing through the economy.

At other times, though, Labour confused voters by borrowing policies from the right. The proposal to raise the old age pension threshold to sixty-seven, for instance, was cribbed from the Act Party. Labour also talked, in imitation of National, about the importance of containing state spending. Campaigning in the high-profile seat of Epsom, David Parker positioned himself to the right of Act candidate John Banks, and called Labour the 'party of fiscal responsibility'. Phil Goff argued often on the campaign trail against National's plan to sell off parts of state-owned companies, but he never committed Labour to changing the corporate structure and profit-making orientation of those companies.

Political scientist Bryce Edwards correctly complained that it was sometimes difficult to differentiate Labour from National during the election campaign. The blurring of the two parties' policies encouraged voters to treat the election not as a clash of ideas but as a charm contest between Goff and the younger and more charismatic Key.

Labour's refusal to campaign on a full-blooded social democratic programme is linked to its lack of faith in grassroots political mobilisation. Members of the party elite like Goff and Parker kept the election programme timid and incoherent partly because they were worried that international money markets and credit rating agencies might adjudge a Labour government 'fiscally irresponsible', and decide to stop the flow of credit to New Zealand, creating a Greece-style economic meltdown.

During economic crises even moderately left-wing governments inevitably clash with big business and international money markets. After 1935 the Labour government faced pressure over its spending programme from the British banks which had lent it money, but Michael Joseph Savage and his caucus were able to use their grassroots support to deflect some of this pressure. Labour's Undersecretary for Housing John A Lee openly criticised the British capitalists, warning them that New Zealand might renege on its debts and seize foreign assets if it were treated unfairly by creditors. John A Lee knew that Labour's tens of thousands of members and New Zealand's trade union movement would not allow a group of foreign bankers to dictate the country's economic policy. He was prepared to call his supporters on to the streets in defence of Labour's programme.

The pragmatic Savage and his Finance Minister Walter Nash were eventually able to make a deal with the British banks, but the threats of radicals like Lee and the strength of grassroots support for Labour had strengthened their negotiating position.

The notion of using people power as a counterweight to the power of capital is simply unthinkable to the elite of today's Labour Party. Where leaders like John A Lee saw Labour's members as a mass force, the likes of Goff and Parker see them simply as door-knockers and raffle ticket sellers.

As long as its grassroots members are disempowered and disregarded, Labour will never advance a coherent left-wing policy programme. The concerns of business and the international money markets will always be more important.

Fortunately, New Zealand has recently seen the emergence of a party with an engaged membership and a staunchly left-wing programme. Instead of waiting for the outcome of another leadership contest amongst their party's distant and secretive elite, Labour's long-suffering grassroots members should make the move to Mana.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Before the carpet comes up

2011-12-01T11:02:00.015+13:00

I've been, by my modest standards, a bit of a social butterfly this week: after launching my book Feeding the Gods on Sunday, I squeezed into a room at the New Zealand Film Archive offices on Monday night to watch Tongan Ark, Paul Janman's documentary film about the 'Atenisi Institute, and to join some Tongan and palangi intellectuals and artists in a discussion about the thought of Heraclitus, the impact of globalisation on Tonga, and Okusi Mahina's ta va theory of space and time (there'll be more previews of Tongan Ark over coming weeks - I'll keep you posted).

I'd love to post a report on Paul's film and the debate which followed it, but I have to evacuate this room in a few minutes because Skyler has, out of some instinct which is alien to me (is it a sort of semi-conscious, and therefore misdirected, archaeological curiosity?), decided that the carpets in our house need to be pulled up. Hopefully, order will have been restored to our home and to our relationship by the weekend.

In the meantime, here are a few photographs from the launch of my book and Bronwyn Lloyd's collection of short stories The Second Location. A couple of the images show Paul Janman and me playing a modified form of monopoly with a map of the South Pacific and a few fragments of poetry. Working in the tradition of Jack Ross and the young Bruce Springsteen, Paul and I rolled dice and moved our tokens - he got the racing car, while I had to settle, as usual, for the thimble - over a series of landscapes which appeared in my book, moving from Antarctica, through Pig Island and Outback Australia, to Tongatapu, where the last poem in the volume ends.

As we passed through different landscapes, Paul and I asked a series of 'psychogeographic' questions of the audience, and handed people who bellowed the correct answers copies of books by Titus or, even better, CDs of interviews with such Titus-related luminaries as Ted Jenner, Richard Taylor, and Michael Arnold. I've reproduced some of our questions below.
Question: how many previously unclimbed South Island mountains did the proto-psychogeographic writer and self-confessed 'hillman' John Pascoe ascend on his weekends and holiday breaks in the 1930s?

a) 2
b) 3
c) 25

Question: Which New Zealand Prime Minister was also an enthusiastic member of the British Israelite movement?

a) William Massey
b) Keith Holyoake
c) Geoffrey Palmer Question: how many Portage Roads are there in Auckland?

a) 2
b) 3
c) 27 Question: what ancient artefact was found at Muriwai Beach two summers ago?

a) a waka tiwai
b) a flying saucer
c) a Celtic observatory
d) Allen Curnow's pipe

Question: which people introduced the camel to the Australian Outback?

a) the Dutch
b) the Barkindji
c) the Afghans

Question: when asked by Richard Taylor to name the characteristics of West Coast poetry, Leicester Kyle gave which of the following one word answers?

a) coal
b) watercress
c) homebrew

Question: which political activist and archaeologist divided his time between protesting against militarism and cataloguing World War Two-era archaeological phenomena like tank traps around Kawhia Harbour?

Question: why was Jacky Marmon reputed to have asked to be buried on top of one of the high hills overlooking the Hokianga harbour?

Question: when did the ferry service between Auckland and Paeroa end?

Question: what is the Tongan word for Hawai'iki?

Missing photos and misinterpreted ruins

2011-11-28T17:34:00.019+13:00

Yesterday's launch of Bronwyn Lloyd's book of stories The Second Location and my book of poems Feeding the Gods went well, with old and new friends alike turning up to Ponsonby's Objectspace Gallery to devour the food Bronwyn and her sister had baked, drink the booze Creative New Zealand had stumped up for, listen to a thoughtful Michelle Leggott talk about the relationship between scholarship and creative writing, and watch Paul Janman and I play our own adaption of Jack Ross' literary adaption of the grand old game of monopoly.

As I struggle to shake off today's hangover, though, I can't lay my virtual hands on any photos from the launch. I lost Skyler's camera last September, after I got too close to the edge of the reef on 'Eua Island, and got knocked for six by a wave. I noticed various handheld devices flashing and beeping away yesterday, as I moved my thimble counter over the monopoly board version of the South Pacific that Paul and I had constructed, but I can't find any photos of yesterday's action in the blogosphere or on facebook today.

I have occasionally presented myself as a grumpy technosceptic and a foe of innovations like facebook, but I have to admit that the absence of authenticating images of yesterday's event fills me with an almost existential unease. Was it Richard Nixon or Marshall McLuhlan who said, back in the 1960s, that an event which wasn't reported on television didn't really happen? Perhaps today we could modify that quote, and say that a literary event which hasn't been preserved in the chaotic canons of facebook and the blogosphere never really happened?

Since I haven't got any authenticating photos to offer, I thought I'd post one of the shorter poems in my new book (I posted one of the longer poems here). The poem was written after I visited Muriwai Beach near the end of last year to inspect a ruined building which I suspected might have been built as a coastal observation post during World War Two, when many Aucklanders feared that Japanese forces might use their lonely West Coast as a 'back door' into New Zealand's largest city. The Home Guard certainly set tank traps on some of the roads that lead to the West Coast, and also cut paths through the bush down to possible Japanese landing points, but a look at Ramparts on the Sea, Peter Cooke's two-volume study of the history of New Zealand's coastal defences, suggests that beaches like Muriwai were never given the pillbox observation posts and the gun emplacements which are still such features of Auckland's eastern shoreline. If a Kiwi pillbox isn't in Cooke's book, then it probably never existed. Because I was preoccupied with military history during my trip to Muriwai the whole environment took on a strangely martial air, and prompted this rather paranoid poem.

Muriwai

A telescope, on a half-painted
deck - a telescope aimed over
Maori Bay, over gannets
that circle low, awaiting
permission to land
on that flat rock,
their aircraft carrier.
A telescope aimed
to blow up these details.

A taua of middle-aged Poms,
camped on an eroded
midden, between the bunker
and the beach - a taua armed
with chilly bins: with Tetley's,
Boddingtons, Victoria Bitter.

One of the Poms lies
apart from the rest,
on a bed of crushed lupins
and loose sand, and aims
an invisible rifle high
above his head.
Silently he shoots down
the monotonous flocks.
[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Paavo on psephology

2011-11-26T12:51:00.007+13:00

In view of the authoritarian side our Prime Minister has been showing in recent weeks, I'd better not break the law which forbids election day propagandising.

I can't resist quoting, though, one of the many fine short poems - poems which are at once gnomic and aphoristic - that the Finnish* modernist Paavo Haavikko produced during his career in the second half of the twentieth century:

I vote for Spring, Autumn gets elected, Winter forms the cabinet.

I think about Haavikko's poem every time I vote.

*In case you're wondering, I don't know Finnish: on the page, the language looks to me almost as full of strange spellings and syntactic thickets as Basque, or Rotuman. I rely for my knowledge of Haavikko on the Finnish-American translator-poet Anselm Hollo. Back in 2008 I included Hollo's translation of Haavikko's The Winter Palace in my list of the twenty great long poems of the twentieth century.

[Posted by Scott/Maps]

Winston takes Deng Xiaoping for a drive

2011-11-22T14:17:00.034+13:00

It was one of those prepared phrases, those would-be soundbites, which politicians like to squeeze into televised debates in the last precious moments before the moderator shuts them down, and turns the audience's attention to another election candidate. The phrase didn't win even a flutter of applause from Television New Zealand's studio audience, and it was ignored by the other participants in the Minor Leaders Debate, but it deserves at least some discussion, because it tells us a great deal about the politics of one of the most influential figures in this year's election.

"I don't care whether the doctor is black or white or brindle", Winston Peters had said, leaning over his lectern and attempting to hold the gaze of a wavering television camera, "as long as that doctor, male or female, can fix me".

Peters used this curious formulation during an argument with other party leaders over the problems of Maori in contemporary New Zealand. After condemning the 'separatism' which the Maori seats in parliament and Maori-language schools supposedly foster, Peters had argued that lack of educational and economic opportunity, not racial prejudice, was to blame for Maori problems. By junking kohanga reo and other 'separatist' educational facilities and creating more jobs, a New Zealand First government would, Peters suggested, make sure more young Maori moved out of poverty and into the middle classes. The slogan about black or white doctors was apparently supposed to underline Peters' argument that the route to achievement was the same for all young New Zealanders, regardless of their ethnicity.

Peters' slogan appears to have been cribbed from Deng Xiaoping, the effete, guttural-voiced dwarf who fought alongside Mao during China's Revolutionary War, was persecuted for his insufficient revolutionary fervour during the Cultural Revolution, and finally became effective leader of his country after the Great Helmsman's death in 1976.

In the 1980s Deng opened the Chinese economy to market forces and foreign investment, while at the same time machine-gunning students and workers who had the temerity to demonstrate for freedom of speech and free elections.

Attempting to justify his departure from Maoist economic orthodoxy, Deng coined the slogan 'It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice'. That phrase may have been less resonant than 'All power grows from the barrel of a gun' or 'A revolution is not a dinner party', but it became the cornerstone of 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics', which replaced Maoism as the official doctrine of China in the '80s (for some peculiar reason, the term 'Dengism' has never caught on, although it is sometimes used in a derogatory way by hardline Maoists opposed to China's new paradigm).

I'm not sure what Winston Peters' supporters would think of him quoting a Chinese communist. As a young National MP in the 1980s during the chilly last years of the Cold War, Peters was fond of 'reds under the beds' rhetoric. In 1986 he bemused parliament and the media by claiming that the Mikhail Lermontov, the Russian cruise ship which ran aground and sunk in the Marlborough Sounds, had been on a secret KGB mission.

In the mid-'90s, after parting ways with National, Peters firmed up support for his fledgling New Zealand First Party by running a scare campaign against Asian immigration to this country, speaking in RSA clubs and Housie Halls up and down the country about the dubious loyalties and criminal tendencies of slanty-eyed Kiwis. Although Peters' Asian-bashing has become less pronounced over the years, it is still a part of the arsenal of New Zealand First. In the lead-up to the 2008 election New Zealand First Deputy Leader Peter Brown warned of 'a flood' of Asians arriving in this country, and at the beginning of this week Grey Power, an organisation with close connections to Peters and his party, asked the Auckland City Council to consider whether Asian immigration to New Zealand's largest city should be curbed.

But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Peters has found a slogan in a strange place. The man's speeches and interviews have always been collages drawn from the most diverse and contradictory sources.

Peters can take inspiration from high as well as low culture. In a speech he gave to a mass meeting of Grey Power in 1992, when he was courting expulsion from the National Party by opposing its plans to cut the old-age pension, Peters quoted Dylan Thomas' famous elegy for his father, urging his audience to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light".

A decade later, when he was under fire for his Asian-bashing campaign, Peters discussed some of the linguistic and DNA research which had established that what we now know as mainland China was the ultimate ancestral homeland of the Austronesian peoples. Peters pointed out that he was a Maori, and that Maori are a Polynesian and therefore Austronesian people. How then, he asked, with mock bewilderment, could anyone accuse him of racist attitudes towards Chinese people? Clearly he was himself Chinese! Peters didn't mention that the Austronesians left the land now known as China more than eight thousand years ago, long before the emergence of Chinese culture.

Peters can bowlderize high-falutin' literature and breaking research in the human sciences, but he's also happy to work a dodgy joke or two into his performances. He's fond of saying that, because he has both Maori and Scottish heritage, he has the advantage both of a natural suntan and an understanding of the importance of fiscal restraint. In the early '90s he caused controversy by telling a joke about a Jewish man who knelt in his synagogue and prayed for a winning Lotto ticket. As nervous laughter spread through his audience, Peters described how the walls of the synagogue began to shake, and God's thunderous voice delivered the message "Give me a break, Jew, buy a ticket". This joke was so good that Peters apparently retold it in 2005.

A lot of political commentators have described Peters as an outdated figure, an old man who cannot hope to maintain his political career in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Arguably, though, Peters' contempt for logic and conventional political categories and his chaotically entertaining style of exposition make him a very contemporary figure.

The British sociologist Gregor McLennan has talked about how, with the end of the Cold War, the decline in class struggle in most Western countries, and the dumbing down of popular culture and the media, many politicians have ceased to identify themselves with the left or the right of the political spectrum, and instead embraced a 'vehicular' approach to ideology. According to McLennan, politicians like Tony Blair have became adept at adopting an idea, 'driving' it to a particular political destination, and then abandoning it.

In New Zealand, Winston Peters has been a pioneer of vehicular politics. During his nearly four decades in the political game he has reinvented himself again and again, 'driving' one set of ideas and slogans after another. The right-wing Peters of the 1980s was replaced, in the early '90s, by the social democratic Peters, who defended pensioners against the neo-liberal policies of the Bolger-Shipley government, and who had come to see the value of Maori seats. Peters took a turn to the right when he joined the Bolger government in 1996, and rediscovered his distaste for Maori 'separatism' at the end of the decade, after falling out with the New Zealand First members who had won the Maori seats off Labour. Peters moved left again when he joined Labour in government in 2005, and he has even appropriated some of the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement in recent weeks, in an attempt to play to the mood of disgust with the financial sector which he detects in his audiences.

As this blog has noted, Peters is not without his youthful supporters. It can be argued that, with his preference for resonant soundbites over extended argument, and his disdain for hoary notions of left and right, Peters is well-placed to appeal to a generation raised on twitter and on claims that the old ideological battles of the twentieth century are dead. Winston may be driving for some time to come.

[Posted by Scott/Maps]

Fascism, elections, and poetry

2011-11-20T10:07:00.010+13:00

A week ago I posted an 'Election Statement' from Titus Books, which advertised the launch, on the day after New Zealand goes to the polls, of my book of poems Feeding the Gods, and Bronwyn Lloyd's book of short stories The Second Location.

Titus' statement did not underestimate the importance of New Zealand's upcoming general election, nor of politics in general, but it argued that poetry and stories ought to have as much importance in our society as the more perishable literature produced by candidates and media pundits in the lead-up to polling day. At one point in its missive, Titus quoted the great and controversial twentieth century poet Ezra Pound's dictum that 'Literature is news that stays news'.

Farrell, a regular reader of this blog and an occasional commenter here, wondered whether Titus was wise to quote Pound:

Both books sound good. I hope to be [at the launch]. I winced though at seeing the foaming-at-the-mouth murderously-racist-fascist Pound being quoted in a plea for literature to be considered more important than elections. However much one can defend poems by fascists, as Richard [Taylor] so eloquently does, (but not poems like Yeats' notorious marching song for the Irish fascists), it is disappointing that Titus should be so blind to the world outside literary stylistic concerns as to quote Pound in a piece about elections. One could make the same point and draw inspiration not from the poisonous Pound but from the harmless Proust who lamented the fact that we don't get Shakespeare's plays delivered at our doorsteps everyday and keep the gossip and petty-crime for dusty volumes on the top shelf?

Ezra Pound has provoked controversy almost every time he has popped up at this blog. To his most earnest supporters, Pound is a man who almost single-handedly revolutionised poetry in the early twentieth century, modernising and dynamising its language, opening it to the influence of non-European cultures, and proving that it could compete, in length and in seriousness, with the modern novel. To his detractors, Pound is a talented writer who threw away his promise when he embraced the doctrine of fascism in the early '30s, and who discredited himself definitively by making hundreds of violently anti-semitic radio broadcasts from Italy during World War Two.

For many people, myself included, Pound is an awkward, painful figure, an object both of admiration and disgust. Back in June I posted about my conflicted feelings towards Pound, and about my arguments with Ted Jenner, a former New Zealand correspondent for Paidemua, the journal of Ezra Pound studies. Like Farrell, I find it difficult to enjoy Pound's epic poem The Cantos, where passages of undeniable beauty give way, with a suddenness that can be dizzying and nauseating, to rants about the evils of usurious Jews.

And yet I can't help feeling some affection for Pound: I owe, after all, some of the techniques which I use in my poems, and which I enjoy in the poems of my peers, to the innovations he made, in the face of the derision of the literary establishment and the contempt of mainstream society, a century ago. How can any modern poet completely disown Pound, without going back to writing like AE Housman or Tennyson?
Ted Jenner had little sympathy for my anxieties over Pound. In a comment he left under the post I made in June, he accused me of bringing politics too close to art:

Your comments on Pound betray the the bias of a doctrinaire socialist who cannot force himself to recognise that good poetry might be written by someone who expressed (yes, virulently at times) sympathy with causes such as Fascism and Anti-Semitism. And yet having known you for three years now, I do not believe you are of a doctrinaire nature. You do, however, evince blind spots in the case of two poets whose politics I abhor but whose poetry I admire, namely EP and Leigh Davis.

It seems to me that there is something a little doctrinaire about Ted's insistence, in this statement, that discussions about poetry, and by extension all of the arts, should be kept insulated from arguments about politics.

I remember talking with Ted about the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand, which prompted him to take to the streets with tens of thousands of other New Zealanders, and which eventually cost him a tooth. Ted lamented the way that Kiwi rugby fans completely disregarded the political system of South Africa, and believed that they could host a South African rugby team without giving aid and comfort to apartheid. "If Nazi Germany were still around in 1981 had a rugby team, I think many New Zealand rugby fans would want to host that team", he complained.

If it is irrational to keep sport and politics rigidly separated, isn't the 'art for art's sake' line that Ted uses to protect Pound from his detractors also quixotic? Pound himself saw The Cantos not as some abstract, self-referring work, but as an attempt to intervene in the world, and to affect the course of history. Shouldn't we take his intentions seriously?

I talked with Brett Cross, the boss of Titus Books, yesterday about Farrell's comments. Brett didn't necessarily disagree with much of what Farrell had said, but he suggested that it would be a mistake to associate Pound completely with fascism. Brett pointed out that Pound's most influential work was done in the first decades of the twentieth century, before the demented odes to Mussolini and the denunciations of Jews. He suggested that Pound's notorious wartime radio broadcasts were the product partly of mental illness, and he argued that, in the late work he did after being released from an American psychiatric hospital and returning to Italy, Pound showed remorse for his anti-semitism.

It is certainly true that the sparely beautiful last pages of The Cantos contain phrases - 'my errors and wrecks lie about me' and 'I cannot make it cohere' are two famous examples - which suggest that Pound had realised the awfulness of the politics he had embraced in the 1930s and '40s. But there are also photos of the elderly Pound giving stiff-armed salutes.

It seems to me that we should not try to resolve the case of Pound, either by using his fascism to dismiss all his work or by rehabilitating him using a rhetoric of art for art's sake. He should remain an awkward, painful character, an example of the way that art can neither be reduced to politics nor removed from the influence of politics.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Labour, neo-liberalism, and a blueberry smoothie: a chat with Carmel

2011-11-18T09:40:00.032+13:00

A number of commentators have seen the burgeoning 'Tea Cup Gate' scandal as a symptom of a growing estrangement between politicians and voters.

As recently as the 1970s, New Zealand's major political parties had enormous memberships and vibrant internal lives, and general elections were dominated by rallies and debates in local halls. Any politician who made it to parliament was used to fronting up to large local party meetings, and to arguing for his or her policy programme in rowdy public meetings.

In the last few decades, though, party memberships have declined drastically, and politicians have become more accustomed to confronting television cameras than querulous constituents. Election campaigns have become meticulously managed affairs, where party leaders kiss babies and pose with handpicked supporters, and obsessively avoid dissent and debate. Politics has turned from a pastime of the masses to an elite sport, and both the public and the media have been made into spectators.

Now the apparently accidental recording of a conversation between John Key and John Banks offers journalists and voters an opportunity to penetrate the carefully constructed facade of contemporary politics, and to get an insight into how election campaigns are really run, and how politicians really think. Bryce Edwards has argued that the infamous 'tea cup tape' promises to give the media and the public some relief from an over-managed election campaign:

The media’s relationship with politicians is extremely problematic in New Zealand...The political class is so extremely well resourced, the media is at a huge disadvantage in covering the politicians. Parties in Parliament have access to Parliamentary Service and Ministerial Services funding of many millions...in the Prime Ministers’ Office there are about 25 communications staff...As a result, the public rarely gets to see what goes on behind the scenes in politics. We are fed a constant stream of scripted campaigning...

I was thinking about Edwards' argument yesterday, after I had an unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable encounter with one of Labour's high-profile election candidates.

Skyler* and I had been having a coffee at the fledgling cafe in the community centre of the West Auckland suburb of Ranui, when I decided to take a look at the pile of withdrawn books in the little library which lodges in the same building. After nabbing a dogeared tome by the great Michael Moorcock for a dollar, I headed back to the cafe to finish my flat white and found Labour list MP and Waitakere electorate candidate Carmel Sepuloni ensconced at my table, talking with Skyler.

Carmel, who had parked a car emblazoned with campaign slogans beside the cafe, was initially very friendly, asking me about myself and about my voting intentions. When I went beyond pleasantries, though, and began to ask some questions about Labour's policies and election strategy, she quickly became defensive. Although Carmel talked with me for five or so minutes, she asked me not to repeat some of the things she said. This request seemed to me very odd: we were talking, after all, about the details of a general election campaign, not about some sensational murder trial or international spy ring.

Carmel eventually got rid of me, after telling me repeatedly that she wasn't really in the mood for politics, and that she had only come to the cafe in Ranui to get a blueberry smoothie. As I wandered away from the cafe, though, I noticed her happily chatting with another patron, and posing for a photo with him.

It seemed to me that Carmel Sepuloni was keen to perform the sort of superficial campaigning rituals which politicians have become accustomed to in New Zealand - to shake hands, pose for pictures, kiss babies, sign autographs, and so on - but very unwilling to engage in any sort of sustained discussion about ideas. And although she reluctantly spent a few minutes discussing ideas with me, Carmel seemed to expect that such a discussion should, as a matter of course, be kept private.

Both Carmel's lack of interest in serious political discussion and her insistence that an ordinary political discussion with one of her constituents should be kept private seem to me to reflect the culture that has developed in the last few decades in New Zealand politics. Sepuloni may be campaigning for a more progressive set of policies than John Key or John Banks, but she seems to share their passion for politics as theatre, and their hostility to real political argument.

I wrote down my conversation with Carmel shortly after I left the cafe in Ranui. The discussion is not likely to trouble the headline writers, but I think it nevertheless touches on some interesting issues - issues which have taken up space on this blog over recent weeks and months.

A chat with Carmel Sepuloni

SH: I suppose it's going to be a close out here in Waitakere?

CS: Yes. There a lot of people who still haven't made up their minds. We are working hard to get the votes out.

SH: Paula Bennett has this image as a staunch Westie chick, doesn't she? The fact that she sits around the Cabinet table with the representatives of the country's wealthiest one per cent, and takes orders from the richest man in parliament, doesn't really seem to have affected that image -

CS: It's just an image, like John Key's image as a nice average guy. But Labour is beating National on policy, people agree with us on policy, and we think Labour can form the next government.

SH: Are you worried about what might happen next year if Labour is elected, and faces a Greek-style economic crisis, along with pressure from international and local business interests to implement neo-liberal austerity measures, of the kind Greece and Spain and Italy are implementing right now? Could we go back to 1984?

CS: I'm much more worried about what National will do if they get in.

SH: I'm not saying we shouldn't be worried about National! But I notice that in Greece and also in Spain it is Labour-style social democratic parties which are doing the work of the International Monetary Fund and local capitalists, overseeing big cuts in government spending, laying off state workers, cutting pensions, cutting union rights -

CS: I don't know about that. I'm focused on my community here in West Auckland, and on my party.

SH: But there's a local precedent, isn't there? In the 1980s it was the Lange-Douglas government that brought neo-liberalism to New Zealand. They did what National could never have done, because they had the support of the unions and the poor. National could never have gotten away with Rogernomics.

CS: Labour is a different party today. And I am focused on the here and now. We need to beat Paula Bennett. I haven't got time to get into arguments about history.

SH: I don't think it's an antiquarian debate. I think it's a real danger. From the statements I've seen you making I think you're on the left of the Labour Party. I think you identify with the social democratic tradition, and want to defend the welfare state and union rights and to redistribute wealth downwards -

CS: Of course. And that's why I am trying to get the vote out against Paula Bennett.

SH: Aren't you worried, though, about some of the more right-wing people in your caucus, people who might be future leaders, people who don't share your vision?

CS: I have no idea who you're talking about.

SH: Shane Jones, David Cunliffe -

CS: Cunliffe? You think Cunliffe is right-wing? I wouldn't say that at all. I'd put him on the left of the party. Shane Jones - I wouldn't call him right-wing. I'd say Shane's a centrist. Shane is in the middle of the party. Someone who is on the right, I'd say, is David Parker. Don't quote me on this, please, or I'll deny it. But David Parker is on the right of the party, very much so. But please don't repeat that. Labour has changed since the 1980s. It's not the same party. I know that - I know my party.

[This comment by Carmel particularly interested me: I blogged a couple of weeks ago about how troubling I find some of the talking points that Parker is using over in the Epsom electorate, where he seems to be trying to place himself to the right of John Banks...]

SH: You're not worried at all about a replay of Rogernomics?

CS: I am focused on winning in Waitakere. I don't want to get into this sort of argument with you. We lost last time by only six hundred votes. We're still enrolling people here now. Last time we only lost because we didn't the vote out -

SH: In 2005 it was the big ballot boxes from South and West Auckland which got Labour home in a tight race and kept Brash out. Do you think that the fact that people didn't turn out in such numbers in the South and the West in 2008 indicates that Labour didn't do enough for those areas in its last term? I mean, the party shacked up with the right, with New Zealand First and United Future, instead of looking to its left -

CS: I don't agree with that. I think it was moral issues that kept voters away, especially in the Pasifika community. We didn't have a proper conversation with them on issues like Civil Unions, Section 59...a lot of them misunderstood Section 59, and thought we were interfering in their families. They wondered "What's happened to our party?"

SH: I can see what you mean. But didn't cultural issues like those come to the fore because Labour did nothing ambitious to remodel the economy - Labour had nine years to reverse the damage that neo-liberalism did to our country in the '80s and '90s, but it did nothing radical -

CS: That's not true. Labour did a huge amount. There was Kiwibank, Kiwisaver, Working for Families -

SH: But nothing structural. Those were just surface measures. Labour didn't even reverse the 1991 cuts in benefits, which are acknowledged as the leading cause of the increase in poverty in this country -

CS: Nothing structural? What about the renationalisation of New Zealand Rail and Air New Zealand?

SH: The renationalisation of Air New Zealand was done in the interests of business. Workers were laid off by the hundred ater the renationalisation and Ralph Norris, the head of the Business Roundtable, was put in charge of the company. Nationalisation is not automatically progressive -

CS: I don't think you know what you're talking about. I think Labour did a lot. I think it's a real shame that there are people like you who attack other people on the left instead of National.

SH: I don't want to sound sectarian. I accept there are big differences between Labour and National. One is a party supported by the poor, the other is the party of the rich. One advocates neo-liberalism, the other advocates social democracy -

CS: And that's why I'm focused on beating Bennett. It will send a great signal if she is defeated.

SH: I agree. I'd like to see her out of parliament. But if Labour is to avoid being captured by the right, and forced to push through a neo-liberal agenda, as a response to the international economic crisis -

CS: That's not going to happen. And I've already told you I'm not interested in discussing that stuff -

SH: Labour needs allies. The left-wing people in Labour need allies. I support the Mana Party, which is fighting these elections on a left-wing platform - tax cuts for the poor and raises for the rich, renationalisation of key assets, solidarity with trade unions and with the Occupy movement - and I think that Labour should be allying itself with Mana, against the right. Instead, though, Labour has branded Mana an 'extremist' party and tried to destroy it.

CS: That's not true. I've never said that.

SH: Phil Goff has repeatedly stated that Labour will not work with Mana, before or after the election, because it is an extremist party. And Labour poured huge resources into trying to kill off the Mana Party by beating Hone Harawira in the Te Tai Tokerau by-election. At the same time as Labour refuses to work with Mana, though, it is courting New Zealand First, a party led by a bigot, a party of the right -

CS: I've never criticised Mana. I didn't campaign against Hone. Others may have, but I didn't. Labour is a team. You might disagree with your leader, but you don't attack him in public. That's discipline.

SH: I'm pleased you didn't campaign against Hone. I think Labour should have welcomed him as an ally. Did you argue in caucus against the decision to call Mana extremist? Were there a few people who disagreed with the strategy of calling Mana extremist?

CS: I'm not prepared to say that. I don't want to talk about this. You know, I just came here for a smoothie, I didn't want a big political debate. I don't want to change your mind. You're entiled to your own opinions. But I think it's a shame there are people like you who are always attacking the left and refusing to work with Labour.

SH: I don't think I'm attacking the left. I'm advocating that the left unites against National. Phil Goff might need Hone's support on confidence and supply to form a government. I don't know why he wants to brand Mana as extremist and rule out dealing with the party - especially when he's open to dealing with Winston Peters! Surely Mana and people like Hone and Sue Bradford and John Minto have more in common with the founding principles of the Labour Party than Winston Peters?

CS: Labour has to deal with the people in parliament. It has to use the hand it is dealt.

SH: I appreciate that. But Labour has a history of looking to its right, and trying to wipe out parties on its left. It chose Peters as a coalition partner over the Greens in 2005. And back in 2002 it ran a big campaign against Laila Harre out here in the West, making sure she lost, and that the Alliance disappeared from parliament. Labour threw away a left-wing partner.

CS: I'm very pleased Laila lost, because we got Lyn Pillay instead. And Lyn Pillay was a great MP for the West. It sounds like you wanted National to form a government in 2002 and 2005. Are you friends with that Matt guy, what's his name? The union guy? Matt...

SH: Matt McCarten of Unite? I don't know him.

CS: That's the one. He wanted Laila Harre to win. He said we should have helped the Alliance. There is this real problem on the left of people attacking other people on the same side. It's a shame you don't want to help me beat Paula Bennett. But I don't want to waste my time arguing with you. I only came to this cafe for a smoothie - if you'll excuse me I'd like to drink it.

SH: It is a nice-looking smoothie.

CS: It's a blueberry smoothie. I love them. I feel like a kid when I drink them...

SH: Thanks for talking with me anyway.

*Skyler might well have something to say about this post. She is an active supporter of Carmel Sepuloni and disagrees with many of my criticisms of the contemporary Labour Party.

[Posted by Scott/Maps]

Why 'Tea Cup Gate' is not trivial

2011-11-16T12:29:00.013+13:00

It is easy to feel sorry for Bryce Edwards, the University of Otago political scientist who has given himself the task of summarising each day of the election campaign on his blog.

As Edwards must be all too aware, the Northern Hemisphere is currently the scene of extraordinary political turmoil and ideological debate, as an economic crisis shakes Europe and America and pro-democracy protests surge through the Arab world. Instead of getting to apply himself to these sorts of profound events, Edwards is forced to write, day after day, about the cup of tea which John Key took with John Banks in an Epsom cafe, and the suppressed recording of the conversation which the two men shared. It's no wonder that Edwards is complaining, in an opinion piece published in today's New Zealand Herald, that our election has become a 'circus', where personalities are more important than policy, and trivial disputes obscure the very serious economic situation New Zealand faces.

The Leader of the Opposition seems to share Edwards' impatience with the controversy now being dubbed 'Tea Cup Gate'. Phil Goff has ridiculed John Key's complaint to the police over the recording of his talk with Banks, and has called for Key to allow the release of the recording. But Goff seems to want to shift debate away from the infamous conversation, and back towards issues like National's plans to sell off shares in state-owned companies.

Edwards and Goff might be a little too quick, though, to dismiss the significance of the controversy over the chat Key and Banks had last week. Even before Key met with Banks, there had been widespread criticism of National's attempts to keep its ailing Act Party ally in parliament by getting an Act MP reelected in Epsom. National voters chafed at instructions to vote for Banks, and supporters of other parties complained about an abuse of the MMP system.

It is hardly unusual, in the era of MMP, for major parties to instruct their supporters to vote tactically, so as to ensure that a favourable minor party gets returned to parliament. What has upset many Kiwis is not National's advocacy of tactical voting, but its attempts to preserve the Act Party, and the suggestion that its support for Act is linked to a secret policy agenda.

For many New Zealanders, the Act Party symbolises the radically right-wing policies which were introduced to New Zealand by the Lange-Douglas Labour government in 1984 and continued by the Bolger-Richardson government which took power in 1990. During the late '80s and early '90s unemployment in New Zealand quadrupled, as scores of state assets were sold at bargain-basement prices, financial markets were deregulated and the dollar was floated, banks and post offices were shut down around the country, and new laws made unions into an endangered species.

The arrival of neo-liberalism in New Zealand came as a near-complete surprise. Labour had fought its 1984 election campaign on a traditional social democratic platform, promising to tackle problems like unemployment and to strengthen unions.

In 1990 New Zealanders elected the National Party, which had cynically promised to reverse some of the worst policies of the Lange-Douglas period. When National actually deepened and elaborated Labour's policies, voters turned to a post-Douglas Labour Party, and to the new Alliance Party.

In the 1993 election Labour and the Alliance won far more votes than National, but the First Past the Post system kept them out of power. In 1996 voters turned to Winston Peters' New Zealand First Party, which had campaigned against right-wing policies like the sale of state assets, only to be disappointed when Peters decided to throw his weight behind National and keep the party in power.

National was finally removed from office in 1999, when Labour won a solid victory by emphasising that it would not return to the policies of the late '80s and early '90s.

National soon discovered that it could not defeat Labour by advocating a return to radical right-wing policies. The Act Party had been formed by men and women nostalgaic for the Lange-Douglas era, but it attracted very little support from voters, and had to rely on populist non-economic causes like crime and Maori-bashing to keep a handful of seats in parliament. In the 2002 election National was routed after advocating a return to the '90s, and it only managed to rebuild support in 2005 by focusing on the seabed and foreshore issue and on Pakeha fears about the supposed 'privileges' Maori were enjoying under Labour.

The global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession have reinforced the long-standing opposition to neo-liberalism amongst New Zealanders. A generation too young to remember the dole queues and rusting factories of the '80s and '90s has seen the world economy brought to its knees by financial markets 'freed' from government regulation.

National only returned to power in 2008 because John Key made a conscious and concerted effort to rebrand the party as a force for moderate rather than radical change. Realising that there was a consensus amongst voters against a return to the policies of the '90s, Key took over the centre ground which Helen Clark had earlier made her own. The fact that Key's caucus was full of retreads from the bad old days of Bolger and Richardson seemed to elude voters.

During National's first term in government Key has projected an affable and moderate image. He has described himself as a political centrist, told low-income voters that he understands their problems, and kept a studied distance from the Act Party. By doing these things, Key has reassured New Zealanders who have traumatic memories of the way the governments elected in 1984 and 1990 betrayed their supporters and took an extremist course.

Now, though, Key has damaged his standing with the moderate majority of New Zealand voters by associating himself with Act, the political symbol of the bad old days, and by appearing to behave in the same duplicitous ways as the governments of the late '80s and early '90s.

By working to get Act back into parliament, when more than 99% of voters appear to reject the party, Key has suggested that a radical right-wing ideology lurks beneath his moderate image. And by trying to suppress the details of the conversation he had with John Banks in that Epsom cafe, Key has given the impression that, like Roger Douglas in 1984 and Jim Bolger in 1990, he has a secret agenda, an agenda which contrasts markedly with the policies he is selling to voters on the hustings.

Despite appearances, then, 'Tea Cup Gate' is much more than a dispute between the media and a politician about privacy and etiquette. If many voters are preoccupied with Key's mysterious conversation with his Act ally it is not because they are diverted from the issues by personalities or media hype, but because Key has reminded them of a disturbed and disturbing period in their country's history. Tea Cup Gate may not compare with the political controversies which are destabilising the Northern Hemisphere, but for many Kiwis it is not a trivial affair.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Remembering Peter Roebuck

2011-11-13T23:20:00.019+13:00

News sites are reporting that the veteran cricket broadcaster and writer Peter Roebuck has killed himself in a South African hotel.

Roebuck captained the Somerset county team in the 1980s, but he was always better at writing and talking than at batting. Well before the end of his playing career he was supplying lucid, allusive articles about the game that he loved to a range of newspapers and magazines.

I remember a piece Roebuck wrote about my boyhood idol, the great West Indian batsman Viv Richards, for an Aussie publication in the mid-'80s. Richards was famous for his super-confident on-field manner and his violent batsmanship - two of his nicknames were 'the Master Blaster' and 'Smokin' Joe' - and cricket commentators and journalists tended to present him as a fearful cliche.

Roebuck, though, gave his readers a lesson in history and politics, by connecting Richards' on-field persona and batting style to the colonisation and decolonisation of the West Indies. Roebuck noted Richards' support for national liberation movements in Africa, his almost uncontrollable hatred of apartheid, his flaunting of Rastafarian symbols, and his violent clashes with racist white cricketers. After reading Roebuck's article - and I had to read it more than once - I knew that I would never think about the game of cricket in the same way again. (The fact that Roebuck's article was written shortly before his very public falling out with Richards, who had played with him for years at Somerset, only made it seem more poignant to me.)

Peter Roebuck was perhaps one of the last representatives of a tradition of literate, ruminative cricket writing and commentary, a tradition which began in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, and which was continued by the likes of Jim Swanton, John Arlott, and New Zealand's own DJ Cameron. Because of its drawn-out and frequently languid nature, a cricket game invites its observers into digressive thinking, in a way that a football match or an athletics meet do not. Cricket writers and commentators have traditionally had to be much more than mere reporters, because they have had to fill the spaces between balls, overs, and dramatic incidents with their words. Whether he was working in the commentary box or at his typewriter, Roebuck was, like Swanton and Arlott before him, able to enrich and explain the games he witnessed by telling stories, sketching portraits of players and officials, cracking wry jokes, and ruminating on subjects that sometimes seemed distant from the world of cricket. In texts like his article on Viv Richards and in the best passages of his radio commentary, Roebuck was able to turn an eccentric and complicated sport into a sort of telescope through which both history and the present could be viewed clearly and in detail.

With his vast vocabulary, digressive style, and taste for literary and historical allusion, Roebuck often seemed out of place in the era of modern sports journalism. After the 'Packer revolution' of the 1970s made televised cricket into big business, the importance of radio commentary to the sport began to decline. With its visual nature, its endless and frequently pointless 'action replays', its inane charts and graphs, and its commercial breaks between overs, televised cricket requires far less literary interpolation from its commentary teams than radio. Where radio commentators of previous cricket eras were famous for their lucidity, today's television commentators are often celebrated for their buffoonery and incoherence. In Australia, for instance, telly commentators like Tony Greig and Bill Lawry have become famous for their silly catchphrases, their struggles to pronounce the names of foreign players properly, and their on-air stoushes with each other.

The advent of internet cricket commentary has also eroded the tradition which Peter Roebuck represented. Websites like cricket.net nowadays provide ball by ball commentary on every international cricket match, but this commentary lacks the old digressive richness of radio.

I can't help but associate symbolically Peter Roebuck's passing and the recent decision of the Radio Sport network to abandon ball by ball coverage of first class provincial cricket in this country. Radio Sport's decision has drawn complaints from many Kiwis accustomed to listening Otago or Canterbury take on Northern Districts or Auckland as they paint the house or fire up the barbecue or sit on their deckchair in the heat of January. For hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, the crackly sound of a cricket commentary from the Basin Reserve or Pukekura Park is as much a part of summer as the hissing of cicadas, or the sizzling of a barby.

Speaking on National Radio last Saturday, Jeff Wilson wondered what Radio Sport listeners were getting so upset about. The station would still provide updates on games every twenty minutes or so, he explained. Surely, given the slow-moving nature of cricket, this is all that is necessary?

Like many elite sportspeople, Wilson has little understanding of the leisurely, ruminative pleasures that cricket can provide. Because he was always focused, during his career as an All Black and a Black Cap, on winning, and on winning as efficiently as he could, Wilson has come to think in a completely instrumental way about sport. He judges a game by how it ends. For many old-fashioned cricket followers, though, the result of a game is less important than the way it is played and observed. An update every twenty minutes can never substitute for the flow of discussion and reflection which good radio commentators provide.

In an era where employers, the education system, and new forms of technology are all demanding that we live at a faster pace, and think in more instrumental ways, traditional ways of playing and following cricket have become anachronistic. That is part of the reason why so many people are keen to hold on to them.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

An election statement from Titus Books

2011-11-11T10:17:00.007+13:00

[Let's face it - the latest election campaign here in New Zealand has been a rather dull affair. Capitalism may be in crisis in Europe, and the Arab world may be convulsed by popular uprisings, but down here in God's Own Country debate on the hustings has revolved around the rival personalities of John Key and Phil Goff. The National government has sought, throughout this election season, to distract attention from weighty economic and philosophical issues, and its strategy appears to have succeeded.

I suspect that there is a relationship between the gravity of the economic and political issues facing the north and the trivialities which currently preoccupy us in the South Pacific. Perhaps New Zealanders are so grateful that their country has not yet suffered the economic fate of the Greeks and Italians that they are happy to luxuriate in a whimsical and trivial political discourse.

Given the rather uninspiring nature of the election campaigning, I hope that even hardened political junkies won't mind me posting a press release from Titus Books which tries to put the poll on the 26th of November into perspective.]

On the 27th of November Vote for Literature!

A Statement by Titus Books

On Saturday the 26th of this month New Zealanders will go to the polls to elect a new government.

Informed, thoughtful voting is a necessary part of life in a democratic society, and the upcoming election has rightly generated thousands of pieces of writing - manifestos issued by parties, leaflets left in letterboxes by candidates, blogs set up by party propagandists, letters to newspapers by irate or delighted prospective voters, and analyses by trained and untrained political scientists.

But the mass of writing our election has created will have a short life span. From the morning of the 27th of November onwards it will be of interest only to political historians and paper recyclers. As the old saying goes, in politics even a week is a long time.

The great modernist poet Ezra Pound said that literature was news that stayed news, because it dealt with problems and questions that were rooted deep in humans and in societies. Since 2005 Titus Books has been publishing poetry, short stories, novels, and essays. The writing we publish rarely wins large audiences, but it doesn't go out of date either.

Publishing books is unfashionable in the twenty-first century. We at Titus have often been told by media pundits and self-styled technology gurus that the book is dead, or at least dying, because it is incompatible with the digital age, when people supposedly think visually rather than verbally, and when everyone is allegedly too busy checking their cellphone or e mail to do the sort of deep, exploratory, creative reading that great writers like Blake and Joyce and Peake have traditionally demanded.

We at Titus Books disagree with the cliches of the anti-literature crowd. We think that literature is as important to a healthy society as polling booths or public hospitals or vaccinations against tuberculosis. Election leaflets and billboards may tell citizens what to think, but poetry and literary prose remind them how to think, and how to feel. By taking us away from the buzz and blare of twenty-first century media and technology, literature helps reconnect us with our deepest convictions and emotions, and reminds us of the treasure houses of human history and culture.

We invite Aucklanders to vote for literature on Sunday the 27th of November, by attending the launch of two new Titus Books, Scott Hamilton's Feeding the Gods and Bronwyn Lloyd's The Second Location. Scott Hamilton is a widely published social scientist, and has a long history as a political commentator and activist. In Feeding the Gods, his Creative New Zealand-funded second volume of poetry, Hamilton draws on his involvement in a number of political and cultural controversies, like the ultimately successful battle to remove the Vanda 'the vandal' Vitali from her position as Director of Auckland museum, the movement against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq last decade, campaigns against the desecration of Maori sacred sites and history, and the battle against this country's Holocaust deniers. Hamilton also writes about more personal subjects, like the suicides of a number of his schoolmates at South Auckland's Rosehill College in the 1990s, his travels through the backblocks of New Zealand, the Outback of Australia, and Western Polynesia, and the bizarre dreams which are a side effect of the prescription drugs he must take for a chronic injury.

Hamilton's poems may deal with many topical issues, but they do not feature easy judgements or political sloganeering. Hamilton is preoccupied by history and by geography, and many of his poems create an eccentric perspective on contemporary problems by dissolving the boundaries between the past and the present, the near and the far. In Feeding the Gods historical figures like Hongi Hika and Karl Marx wander contemporary Australasia, the Outback fills with water, Ulysses cruises the South Pacific, and Maoist guerrillas quote postmodern poetry.

Bronwyn Lloyd is known for her careful reconstructions of the lives of Kiwi painter Rita Angus and composer Douglas Lilburn, and for the beautiful art books she produced for Pania Press. The short stories in Lloyd's The Second Location have the insights into the subtleties of human relationships which made her scholarship valuable, and the attention to detail which distinguished her work for Pania. Under Loyd's intense but not unsympathetic gaze, even small events like a civil servant's filing error or a visit to the beach become filled with significance. Bronwyn Lloyd's work shows us that the lives we live in our homes and in our minds can be far more dramatic than anything we see on television, and that the daily choices we make as friends and as family members can be as fateful as the doings of politicians or corporate executives.

In their different ways, Hamilton's and Lloyd's books show the continuing vitality of literature in the second decade of the twenty-first century. They are, in Ezra Pound's words, news that stays news. Titus Books is proud to ask you to vote for literature on the 27th of November.

Feeding the Gods and The Second Location will be launched at Objectspace Gallery, 6 Ponsonby Road, from three o'clock onwards on Sunday the 27th of November. There'll be beer, wine and plenty of home-baked food, plus a range of Titus titles to sample.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Politics and poetry: a tip from Richard

2011-11-10T00:52:00.015+13:00

A semi-sympathetic reviewer described the great Kiwi poet Kendrick Smithyman as 'widely and sometimes bizarrely read'. The same phrase could be awarded to Richard Taylor, the bookdealer, poet and psychogeographic explorer of Panmure. Richard lives amidst the rubble made by thousands of books, and seems as keen to read treatises on chess games played a century ago, studies of Antarctic history, and elaborately incoherent exercises in conspiracy theory as he is to consume poetry and novels. In the late '90s Richard laboured on The Infinite Poem, which was made up almost entirely of quotes from hundreds of different texts.

Richard occasionally supplies his friends with reading tips, but they tend to involve volumes which have been out of print for a formidably long time, and which can apparently only be acquired through the offices of a certain Panmure bookdealer.

Recently, though, Richard sent me a plug for a new and - I hope - more easily accessible book. I've reproduced his message, and added a few hyperlinks:

I am reading and enjoying a book called American Poets in the 21st Century, edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell.

All of the writers in the book are interesting in different ways, but Mark Nowak would intrigue you the most, I think. Nowak seems to have really got to grips with a dialectical method of writing poetry, and the result is something political.

Nowak takes some of the postmodern, abstract method of the Language poets, and elements of something more traditional. He quotes from working class history, discusses factory closures, the hardships of the unemployed and so on, then comments on the etymology of the words he uses in a manner reminiscent of some of the Language poets. In his poems postmodernism has found a 'use': it works with 'realism' in an interesting way, allowing political statement yet getting around the problem of 'lecturing' and the danger of transparent or sentimental poetry. Nowak sees economic theory and political 'philosophy' and the statements of right wing (or left wing) politicians and theorists as stuff which is analysable as poetry.

Nowak is an active trade unionist, so he doesn't write from a vacuum.

Some of the other writers in Rankine and Sewell's collection are worth your while. There's a black sound poet who comes out of the hip hop scene called Tracy Morris. She won Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican, a working class New York cafe, in the early 1990s, at around the time I was in the city.

The Nuyorican is, or was, a forum of sorts: there were Europeans, Afro-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic groups represented there, and different approaches to poetry were also featured. There was some 'conflict' between the more serious Language poets like Bernadette Mayer and the Lower East Side 'school', which was made up of more direct, lyrical poets.

Perhaps to some extent there is now a kind of merging between these different approaches to poetry, as if a dialectic is working, thesis and antithesis leading to a synthesis...

I recently read your book on Thompson, with its chapter about the quest for a poetry which was political but not crudely propagandistic. Perhaps Mark Nowak has the kind of 'mix' that Thompson was seeking.

And perhaps not only Thompson was seeking to blend politics with poetry. Was it in your book that I read about Marx basing The Communist Manifesto on Faust? And about Marx jumping up in London pubs and drunkenly shouting, in German of course, long passages from Goethe's play? Ha!

[Posted by Maps]

Russell's Red Letter Day

2011-11-08T13:42:00.016+13:00

This blog tries hard to be fatuous and hypocritical, but it's not often we succeed egregiously enough to attract the attention of Russell Fletcher, aka Redbaiter, the blogging scourge of fatuous and hypocritical lefties.

A couple of months ago Russell found the time to visit this blog and denounce my defence of the Prime Ministers' Awards for Literary Achievement. According to Russell, the Prime Ministers' Awards, which see thirty thousand dollars being given every year to two or three outstanding Kiwi scribblers, are a prime example of 'jackbooted communist thugs abusing and corrupting democracy'. By handing some filthy lucre to James Belich, Peter Bland, and Fiona Kidman, John Key had shown that he had 'the same mentality as the UK rioters', and had helped to 'drag our society to its lowest point in history'.

I wasn't particularly surprised by the level of vituperation Redbaiter brought to this blog. Redbaiter is infamous in the Kiwi blogosphere for his attacks on not only the left but large parts of the right. At his own blog and in the comments threads at other sites, Redbaiter has described even conservative National Ministers like Judith 'Crusher' Collins as 'cultural Marxists', and characterised this country as a 'communist police state'. Anybody who dares to disagree with Redbaiter's judgments is inevitably diagnosed as a 'sick liberal', an 'Islamocommunist thug', or a 'leftard'.

As I said a couple of months ago, I don't believe that Redbaiter is using the Kiwi blogosphere and its thousand comments threads to fight some heroic battle with Tourette's Syndrome: I think his manner is quite deliberate.

Redbaiter wants to preclude polite discussion with the rhetorical equivalent of thermonuclear strikes on his opponents. His pre-emptive strikes tend to prompt either dazed silence or return volleys of verbal abuse, and abuse seems to fortify Redbaiter in his belief that everyone to the left of Enoch Powell is a grimly conspiratorial minion of darkness, rather than a human being who disagrees with him about certain political issues.

Redbaiter's curious online behaviour reminds me a little of some of the stories about Jackson Pollock's attempts to woo women in New York bars back in the '40s. Apparently Pollock would, after making a mess of himself by consuming copious amounts of liquor, sidle over to a woman in the corner of a bar and say something along the lines of "You got nice tits - wanna screw?" It's easy to guess the response this invitation got.

Pollock's mates got sick of his drunken mock-macho nonsense, and secretly hired an escort to hang about the bar he frequented. After Pollock had gotten drunk enough to confront her with his usual crude come-on, she answered "Sure - let's go" and grabbed her coat. Pollock fainted. The point is that, for folks like Pollock and Redbaiter, acceptance is somehow more terrifying than angry or annoyed rejection.

Taking inspiration from Jackson Pollock's friends, I made Redbaiter an offer, a couple of months ago, after reading the denunciations of state funding for the arts he left here:

As an inveterate defender of 'Western civilisation', Redbaiter, you should be honoured to have taxes go towards the maintenance of the intellectual tradition Socrates founded, amongst other intellectual traditions. And don't think that the guardians of civilisation are ungrateful. A publisher and a film maker have applications for state funding for projects involving me in the works at the moment: if the projects are approved I'll dedicate the book and the film to you...

Although Creative New Zealand isn't keen on shelling out for a movie about the Great South Road at the moment, Titus Books did recently manage to cadge some money off them for my second volume of poetry (here's a review of the first). Feeding the Gods will be launched, complete with illustrations by the late great Kendrick Smithyman, on the 27th of this month, at Objectspace Gallery in Ponsonby, alongside a collection of Bronwyn Lloyd's stories called The Second Location.

The question is: will the scourge of the Kiwi blogosphere honour me by attending the launch of the book which I have dedicated to him? I hope he makes the 27th a Red Letter Day.

[Posted by Maps]

Labour's history lesson

2011-11-03T14:46:00.017+13:00

Like Chris Trotter I enjoyed the election broadcast the Labour Party made on TV One last Monday night, and found the contrast with National's broadcast fascinating.

While Labour offered up an historical 'long view' of the present, using photos and newsreel footage disinterred from the archives, and then introduced a series of its members of parliament, each of whom seemed intended to represent some segment of New Zealand's diverse population, National's broadcast marooned John Key without his fellow MPs in what looked like a corporate conference room.

In an era where a twenty-four hour news cycle and social media like twitter and facebook sometimes seem to have created the political equivalents of amnesia and aphasia amongst wide segments of the population, Labour's insistence on the significance of the past to the problems of the present was welcome.

Labour offered viewers a rough timeline of the last century of New Zealand history, which took in events like the World Wars, the Great Depression, the post-war boom and its dissipation in the '70s and early '80s, and the trauma of Rogernomics. The party argued that, throughout the last century, thoughtful state intervention in the economy, and in society in general, had been vital to social progress. The Labour Party was presented as the means by which the New Zealand working class had taken hold of the machinery of the state and reformed society. Using their party, the workers had founded the welfare state, built state houses, created fair industrial practices, and ended discrimination against minorities. In the 1980s Labour temporarily slipped from the control of the Kiwi majority, and became the party of neo-liberalism, but that was, we were assured, an aberration.

National was presented throughout the broadcast as the party of the wealthy elite, with policies that sow class war and racial discord.

Some National supporters have criticised Labour's broadcast for making a tidy partisan narrative out of the complexity of the past. Like the Conservatives trying to interfere with the teaching of history in Britain at the moment, these folks seem not to understand that every historical narrative highlights certain events, and downplays or ignores others. History can never be a neutral procession of facts.

Accepting that there are different narratives which can be made out of the same past does not mean falling into some sort of crude historical relativism, of the sort associated with certain postmodernist thinkers. We can compare and evaluate different accounts of the past by asking which of these stories has the most explanatory power. We can ask, especially, whether the interpretation which the narrative is supposed to demonstrate fits with the events that make up the narrative.

This blog has at times discussed the ramblings of Kerry Bolton, New Zealand's most prolific neo-Nazi. Bolton's texts generally discuss the same events as those of more conventional historians, but they embed these events in a very particular and very peculiar narrative. Bolton believes, for instance, that when Roger Douglas and David Lange brought neo-liberalism to this country in the 1980s they were acting at the behest of a cabal of Jewish communists and Jewish bankers.

Bolton's story about the 1980s is not taken seriously because it is so clearly out of tune with the facts it seeks to explain. There weren't many commies in the Backbone Club, after all. Bolton is an extreme case, but he illustrates how we can assess a narrative by examining how well it explains the facts it contains.

How sucessful, then, was the history lesson Labour offered in its election broadcast?

I want to suggest that a number of the events in Labour's narrative actually contradicted the party's claim to be the historical agent of the Kiwi working class and of social progress.

Labour's broadcast began by talking about the formation of the party in 1916, and showing a photo from one of its early meetings. Explaining that Labour grew out of the struggles for better working conditions and wages in early modern New Zealand, the broadcast introduced a photo taken during the bloody Waihi Strike of 1912. This image, which was used on the cover of The Red and the Gold, Stanley Roche's book about the strike, shows workers protesting the death of Fred Evans, the miner who was shot in a Waihi union hall by a gang of drunken cops and scabs. The Waihi Strike was run by the 'Red' Federation of Labour, an organisation which used slogans like 'For the abolition of wage labour' and 'To the world's workers the world's wealth'. Inspired by the Industrial Workers of the World, which was enjoying its heyday in North America in the years before World War One, the 'Red Feds' refused to become involved in parliamentary politics, planning instead to seize power and overthrow capitalism with a general strike. In the 'Great Strike' of 1913 the Red Feds confronted the right-wing government of William Massey, fighting gunbattles in the streets of Wellington and setting up revolutionary councils in several West Coast towns. Cossey eventually defeated the Red Feds by deploying thousands of armed farmers on horseback, and the power of the union movement was much reduced.

The men and women who founded the Labour Party in 1916 were making a conscious effort to chart a new direction for the union movement and for the left. Where the Red Feds had talked of smashing capitalism, the new party talked of regulating and reforming the system. Fair wages and not the abolition of the wage system were to be the new aim. Where the Red Feds had eschewed 'ordinary' politics, Labour made parliamentary elections its focus.

Labour quickly became the dominant force on the left and inside the union movement, but the tradition inaugurated by the 'Red Feds' did not disappear from this country in 1916. A number of organisations, most notably the Communist Party, reaffirmed the revolutionary tradition of the Red Feds in the inter-war years. The Red Feds' example influenced militant post-war unionists like Jock Barnes, the leader of the watersiders during their epic 1951 confrontation with the New Zealand state. In the 1970s and '80s a new generation of radical leftists founded organisations with names like the Socialist Action League and the Workers Communist League, and played a major role in the union movement and in protests over issues like war and racism. Today many members of the left-wing faction in the Mana Party identify with the radical politics of the Red Feds and their various successors.

The Red Feds and their progeny create certain problems for Labour's propagandists. Last Monday's election broadcast tried to present Labour as the sole political representatives of the Kiwi working class, but the Federation of Labour was a mass organisation which espoused a politics very different from the social democratic ideology of Labour. And, although it has been nowhere near as popular as social democracy since 1916, the tradition represented by the Red Feds has persisted in a variety of organisations.

Last Monday's broadcast tried to deal with the Red Feds by making them part of the prehistory of the Labour Party, and this sort of interpretation might be supported by certain historians. Michael King, for instance, argued in his Penguin History of New Zealand and elsewhere that the revolutionary turmoil of the pre-war years was something exceptional in our national history, and that the Labour Party which emerged from the ashes of the Red Feds was, with its moderate ideas and constitutional methods, much more representative of the New Zealand working class than its revolutionary predecessor. King suggested that the leaders of the workers' movement had to be defeated, and to learn from their defeats, before they could found a durable and successful political organisation. The minority which still held to the politics of the Red Feds was rendered irrelevant. But the revolutionary tradition in the New Zealand left was not absent from Labour's election broadcast, even after that broadcast had moved its focus forward from the turbulent first decades of the twentieth century. Even if the revolutionaries were never acknowledged by the broadcast's voiceover, they could again and again be seen, on picket lines and in protest marches.

Labour's broadcast repeatedly referred to campaigns against injustice in New Zealand, and sought to associate Labour with these campaigns. Often, though, it was the members of the tradition represented by the Red Feds who were in the vanguard of the struggles that Labour wanted to claim as its own.

Labour's broadcast discussed the Great Waterfront Lockout of 1951, and expressed sympathy with the locked out wharfies who had their civil rights annulled by Sid Holland's National government. In 1951, though, Labour refused to throw its weight behind the embattled wharfies, who turned instead for support to the Communist Party.

Labour's broadcast went on to discuss the massive anti-Springbok protests of 1981, but it gave no hint that groups to Labour's left, like the Socialist Action League and Nga Tamatoa, played vital roles in running these protests.

During a discussion of the deeply unpopular National governments of the '90s, Labour's broadcast showed footage of the eviction of pensioner Len Parker from his state house in Balmoral. Supported by the State House Action Coalition (SHAC), Parker had barricaded himself in his home in protest at the charging of market rents for state tenants. Hundreds of people turned up to try to protect Parker, and to protest his eventual removal by heavily armed police. Despite repeated requests, though, Labour refused to throw its weight behind Parker's cause. Parker himself was a member of the Socialist Workers Organisation, and many of the activists in SHAC were linked either to the Alliance Party or to small Marxist groups like the SWO or Workers Power.

Labour wants to present itself as the sole political representative of the workers' movement and the sole agent of progressive politics in New Zealand, but when it attempted to tell the story of progressive politics over the past century on Monday night its claims to exclusivity began to unravel.

The voiceover in Monday night's broadcast may have avoided mentioning men like Jock Barnes and Len Parker and organisations like the Communist Party and the Red Feds, but the events the broadcast described and the images it provided hinted at a story more complicated and more interesting than the one Labour wanted to tell.

[Posted by Maps]

'Vote for Moises!'

2011-10-31T21:30:00.032+13:00

My father informed me last night that his boyhood friend Winston Peters is about to hold an election rally out Franklin way, in some war memorial hall or bowls club. "Busloads of old people are coming up here from Tauranga" Dad reported. "The buses will have a reduced capacity, of course, because of all those wheelchairs and oxygen machines they'll have to fit in. And I guess Winston will have to organise ambulances to wait outside the venue, because some of his supporters are liable to collapse with excitement or fatigue."

Apparently forgetting temporarily about his own advancing age, my father went on to joke about "the stroller and rest home vote", and to mock the way Winston's billboards airbrush his face to make him look younger than his sixty-six years.

Winston Peters may be one of the older players in New Zealand's political game, but he is a mere spring chicken compared to Moises Broggi, a senatorial candidate for the Republican Left of Catalan ticket in Spain's upcoming general election. Mark Derby, the Poneke-based historian whose works include a study of New Zealand's links with the Spanish Civil War, recently sent me an e mail about the extraordinary Broggi:

Moises Broggi is 103 years old...I spoke with him (through an interpreter - he doesn't speak English and my Spanish is embryonic) by phone a few years ago, because he worked as a surgeon with the International Brigades side during the Spanish Civil War. One of his medical colleagues and close friends in that period was Doug Jolly, the New Zealand-born surgeon later described as "perhaps the most important volunteer to come to Spain from the British Commonwealth". Moises remembered Jolly warmly and vividly and gave me a great deal of useful information about him. His information came too late for inclusion in the English-language version of my book, but has been incorporated into the forthcoming Spanish-language version...

The global economic crisis which began in 2008 has had a fateful impact on Spain, leaving both businesses and local governments heavily indebted, and making nearly a fifth of the working age population jobless. As protesters fill the centres of Madrid and other cities, the more radical parts of the Spanish left are suddenly getting a hearing from the public.

While Spain's shaky social democratic government is responding to the the country's economic malaise with measures borrowed from the political right, like cuts in the public sector and attacks on trade unions, its radical left is calling for a fundamental shift in power away from business and towards what the Occupy movement calls 'the 99%'. The protesters on the streets and outfits like the Catalan Republican Left are calling for the nationalisation of businesses threatened with bankruptcy, and for a punitive tax on the bankers who helped create the disaster of 2008.

Mark Derby sees a partial parallel between the unstable political situation in contemporary Spain and the turmoil of the 1930s. Back in the '30s the radical left won massive support from Spanish workers and peasants tired of living under the yoke of a semi-feudal landowning class and a deeply conservative Catholic church. When a left-wing government was elected in 1936 the forces of reaction responded with war, but this only radicalised the Spanish people. In Moises Broggi's beloved Catalan region, workers and peasants seized virtually all the factories and farms from the old ruling class and began to run them collectively. Arriving in the Catalonian capital Barcelona in 1936, George Orwell found 'a town where the working class was in the saddle'.

With the help of Hitler and Mussolini the Spanish right eventually won their war against democracy, but the memory of the radical 1930s has been kept alive by men like Moises Broggi.

As my father is all too well aware, Winston Peters has reinvented himself again and again over the decades, adopting and dropping political ideologies and allies with an ease that has sometimes seemed contemptuous. Moises Broggi, by contrast, has remained steadfast in his beliefs. For Catalan socialists, he is a living link between the present and a past which is at once distant and urgently relevant. As Mark wrote, at the end of his message to me:

Who could believe that events and individuals that appear irrevocably buried in the somewhat distant past could reappear to play a part in the exhilarating present? Vote for Moises!

[Posted by Maps]

Hiding on the edge of the world

2011-10-27T23:05:00.013+13:00

A couple of months ago I posted an interview with Sebastien Bano about the botany, culture and politics of the Canary Islands, where he has lived for several years. Mark Derby, the historian whose works include a study of New Zealand's manifold and fascinating connections with the Spanish Civil War, e mailed me to say how much he'd enjoyed Sebastien's talk.

In recent weeks Sebastien has been doing some research on El Hierro, the smallest and westernmost of the Canary Islands. The rocky, dry island was for a long time considered by Europeans to sit at one of the edges of the world.

Sebastien sent me this e mail from El Hierro:

I am honoured that Mark Derby enjoyed the interview. I wonder if Derby knows about the peculiar situation of El Hierro during the Civil War.

Once Franco's Nationalists conquered a region, Republicans were in big trouble. They knew they would be shot if they were caught. On the mainland of Spain, or even on Gran Canaria, the largest island in the Canaries group, Republicans could seek shelter in caves and abandoned houses, in extremely remote valleys and amongst mountains.

El Hierro was the worst place for Republicans to hide, because it is so small. El Hierro also had a very limited population, where everybody knows each other (not only were there tensions on the island between Francoists and Republicans, but there was also a history of rancour between some families and clans).

Despite the difficulties created by their island's small size and divided population, many Herreños showed fantastic courage in supplying shelter to Republicans after Franco's forces conquered the island.

I wonder, however, how these Republicans fared in the long term. Did they carry on living in their hiding place, or did they escape to a foreign country? I imagine that leaving the country was a very difficult project even decades after the end of the Civil War, the national police had lists with the names of the Republicans and anyone who was intercepted went to jail.

My grandfather was only a child when he left Spain for France, but because he was the son of Republicans he had a very bad surprise when he decided to spend his holidays in the country of his birth at the very end of the 60's. He was kicked repeatedly and punched very hard in a police station just across border from France. So I don't want to imagine the fear a Republican soldier hiding on El Hierro could have, and the difficulties he had to find freedom.

We'll send you photos of El Hierro when we get back home.

Sebastien's e mail got me thinking about other small islands which have been subjected to fascist rule. One of Skyler's grandmothers fled with her family from Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, just before a German occupation force arrived there in late 1940. After the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation, Churchill had decided that a few small islands off the coast of Normandy were not worth defending from a rampant German army. The British flag was lowered, and Jersey's local government and police force were instructed to cooperate with the incoming Nazis.

The story of the Nazi occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands has fascinated historians, scriptwriters, and counterfactualists because it seems to jar with the notion that the British were incorrigible opponents of Hitlerism. Most of the inhabitants of the Channel Islands submitted to Nazi authority, even when the Nazis began to deport Jews and import slave labourers to help them build forts and gun emplacements. It is perhaps understandable that the small, communist-led resistance movement which did form on Jersey eschewed violent confrontation with the enemy. With its tiny size and flat, open landscape the island offered little cover for the sort of irregular force which might make hit and run attacks on the Germans, and the decision of the local establishment and much of the population to cooperate, however grudgingly, with Nazism increased the danger of betrayal and detection. The Jersey resistance did succeed in sheltering many enemies of fascism - Jews, escaped slave labourers, well-known communists - until the German abandonment of the islands late in the war.

By the time that the Nazis were being thrown out of France and the Channel Islands, many Spanish Republicans were growing hopeful that their country would be liberated from Franco's rule. Thousands of exiled Republicans who had served in the anti-fascist resistance in France crossed the Pyrennes, and attempted to start a guerrilla war against Franco. But their efforts fizzled out, partly because of the alliance Franco forged in the late 1940s with America, which had decided that his regime was an admirable bulwark against communism. It is sad to imagine Republicans waiting in the basements and copses of El Hierro for a liberation which would not come.

[Posted by Maps]

Labour's Janus head

2011-10-26T11:44:00.041+13:00

At the end of June Greece's governing party began to push another austerity programme through parliament, and came a little closer to collapse. After expressing unease at mass lay-offs of public sector workers and cuts to pensions, and refusing outright to support a law which rolled back the legal rights of unions, the long-serving member of parliament Panagiotis Kouroublis found herself expelled from her party.

Kouroublis may have lost some friends in parliament, but she has become a heroine to the hundreds of thousands of Greeks who have been protesting against the austerity programme with marches, occupations, strikes, and riots. Political analysts have taken to describing Greece as 'ungovernable', and a report by the CIA suggested that a military coup might be the only way to get protesters off the streets.

It is worth noting that the government pushing radical neo-liberal policies on an unwilling Greek working class is filled not with evil bankers or a set of emissaries from European Union headquarters in Brussels, but with social democrats. The Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) has traditionally enjoyed the support of the majority of the Greek working class, and includes in its leadership many former trade unionists. But it is not unprecedented for a social democratic party to respond to an economic crisis by attacking unions, wages, and the welfare state. When the Great Depression came to Great Britain in 1929, the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald decided to cut spending on pensions and schools, acquiesced in mass sackings of workers, and refused, despite the urgings of John Maynard Keynes, to borrow money to stimulate the economy. Businesses were delighted.

In New Zealand the Labour government elected in 1984 was greeted by a debt repayments crisis and a run on the Kiwi dollar. Under the leadership of David Lange and Roger Douglas, the party responded with one of the most thoroughgoing and devastating set of neo-liberal policies seen anywhere in the world. State assets were flogged off at bargain basement prices, tens of thousands of public sector workers found themselves in the dole queue, student fees were increased by several hundred percent, and a Goods and Services Tax which hit the poor hardest was introduced at the same time that company tax rates were lowered. 'Rogernomics' was a blow from which poorer Kiwis and the trade union movement have never altogether recovered.

Labour itself has never quite recovered from the Lange-Douglas era. The party suffered a massive membership decline in the 1980s, and it remains a relatively small organisation today.

Ramsay MacDonald and David Lange were condemned as traitors and as lackeys of the rich by many of the grassroots supporters of their parties. Today similar insults are aimed at PASOK leader George Papendrou by the crowds on the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. But the likes of Lange and Papendrou are not aberrations so much as expressions of one side of the contradiction which is social democratic politics.

At the beginning of the 1920s, when Ramsay McDonald was promising that the Labour Party would govern Britain in the interests of workers rather than employers, Lenin wrote his famously bad-tempered book Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder in an attempt to sum up the nature of social democracy. Lenin described organisations like Labour as 'bourgeois workers parties' - that is, as parties which claim to represent workers, which have mass working class support, and which advocate some policies beneficial to workers, but which side, in the final analysis, with capitalism and the employing class.

During good economic times, Lenin argued, social democratic governments can reward their supporters by delivering them better state services and higher wages. When capitalism goes into crisis, though, and profit levels have to be restored, the bourgeois workers party comes under pressure to save the system it has sworn to work within, by cutting wages and state spending, and siding with bosses against trade unions in industrial disputes.

Lenin was writing before the 1930s, when a number of bourgeois workers parties, including New Zealand's Labour Party, got elected to government and implemented the sort of policies Keynes had unsuccessfully urged on MacDonald. These governments increased rather than cut state spending, borrowing money to cover rises in benefits and wages as well as public works projects designed to stimulate the economy. Keynesian policies were generally pursued because of pressure from trade unions and unemployed workers' organisations, and in spite the protests of big business and the political right.

Like the Roman God Janus, then, social democratic parties have two faces. They can, depending on the state of the economy and the balance of social forces, adopt either moderately progressive or revanchist, pro-business policy programmes. Keynesianism and austerity are both aspects of the social democratic tradition.

The contradictory quality of social democracy is evident in the Labour Party's campaign for November's general election. On the one hand, the party is demanding a rise in the minimum wage and the substitution of a Capital Gains Tax for some of the tax burden the poor presently carry. These measures would, if implemented, increase the spending power of the working class and - in theory, at least - stimulate the economy in traditional Keynesian fashion.

But a very different Labour Party has been campaigning in the wealthy Epsom electorate, where shadow spokesman for Economic Development David Parker is trying to win votes away from Act candidate and former Auckland mayor John Banks. In a recent guest post for David Farrar's right-wing Kiwiblog, Parker revealed that he was trying to appeal to Epsomites by presenting Labour as a 'fiscally responsible' party. Parker wrote that:

John Banks tripled Auckland City Council's debt...This recent history is very damaging for Key as well as Banks, given their repeated assertions that they are fiscally responsible...Labour under Michael Cullen ran substantial surpluses and reduced government debt, which Key and Brash opposed. There is a widening acceptance that Labour were fiscally responsible, at a time when the USA, UK, and most of Europe were not...

In a time of economic crisis, Parker's enthusiasm for 'fiscal responsibility' and his espousal of balanced budgets should send shivers down the spines of left-leaning Labour supporters and trade unionists. It is, after all, in the name of 'fiscal responsibility' and against the perceived excesses of the pre-crisis years that the governments of nations like Greece, Britain, and Spain are forcing through neo-liberal austerity programmes today. For politicians like George Papendrou and David Cameron, balancing budgets means gutting public services, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, and selling state assets. (The fact that Parker throws an allusion to the Occupy Wall Street movement and a criticism of neo-liberalism, aka 'the Chicago School of Economics', into a later section of his article doesn't detract from the significance of his rhetoric about 'fiscal responsibility'; it only shows his shamelessness.)

Parker's rhetoric should also remind us of the Lange-Douglas government of the 1980s, which took pride in positioning itself to the right of its National opponents during debates about state ownership of assets and public spending.

If the global economic crisis continues and New Zealand experiences the sort of meltdown which has been the fate of Greece, will a Labour government respond by turning to the Keynesian policies of the 1930s, or to the scorched earth neo-liberalism of the '80s? The lack of influence of Labour's few grassroots members over the party's parliamentary wing and the lack of power of the contemporary Kiwi trade union movement make a repeat of Rogernomics a distinct possibility. Parker's revival of the rhetoric of the 1980s certainly shows how little commitment senior Labour MPs have to left-wing principles and policies.

As the Greeks are learning, social democratic governments can be the most ruthless defenders of crisis-ridden capitalism.

Footnote: Labour offered another bad omen today.

[Posted by Maps]

An experiment in credulity

2011-10-22T22:40:00.028+13:00

Yesterday Skyler, her father and I explored a few of the rutted and pitted roads of Mamaku, that forested pumice plateauland whose strange beauty James Cowan celebrated in a 1929 essay for the wonderful New Zealand Railways Magazine. As we rattled along between stretches of regenerating rimu and doomed radiata, my father-in-law and I swapped complaints about the irrationality of the world.

Alan bemoaned the Ufologists, psychics, crystal wielders, reiki-enhanced masseurs, and questers after the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria who have infested the Steiner schools where he has spent most of his career; I countered with gripes about Celtic New Zealand conspiracy theorists. We soon reached a comfortably smug consensus about the incorrigibility of human credulity.

My father-in-law has been collecting material on what he calls 'delusional thought disorder' for some years, and has talked about writing some sort of grand polemic against the impact of delusion on the Steiner movement. A couple of days before our adventure on the forestry roads of Mamaku Alan had, apparently in the name of research, watched a documentary, or faux-documentary, which attempted to demonstrate the truth of Erich von Daniken's claim that extra-terrestrials not only intervened in human evolution but eventually gave us all of our major religions. He'd been struck by the ability of the Danikenians to balance the weightiest of conclusions atop the most insubstantial facts.

After our return from Mamaku to the safety of Hamilton's newly-minted outer suburbs, Alan decided to conduct an experiment in credulity. He uploaded a few of the photos we'd snapped during our drive, made a slide show out of them, added some rather paranoid captions and some spooky music and posted the end result online under the title 'Mamaku Unexplored Forest Oddities Display'.

Will the Ufologists, Steiner-worshippers, pseudo-archaeologists, Danikenians, and pseudo-geologists be taken in by Alan's little slidehow? Is Mamaku about to become some sort of New Zealand equivalent of Roswell, or the Bermuda triangle, and attract flocks of paranoid pilgrims and crackpot investigators? Alan told me today me that one or two Ufologists have already picked up on his 'evidence'...

Footnote: since I've just been guilty of advertising one of the numerous pieces of silliness on youtube, let me try to atone by urging everybody to check out this marvellous clip at the same site, in which Tomas Transtromer, winner of this blog's Old Thumper Award in 2007 as well as the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, reads and discusses a poem about Franz Schubert. Tomas' introduction to his poem reveals that it was written partly in response to the campaign against Schubert's notoriously bourgeois music in Maoist China. Richard Taylor may not be amused...

[Posted by Maps]

Why they hate Quade

2011-10-19T04:18:00.022+13:00

In his classic essay 'Our Sea of Islands' the late and much lamented Tongan anthropologist and satirist Epeli Hau'ofa discussed the massive movements of people which have been such a feature of postcolonial Pacific history. Hau'ofa argued that, far from fleeing their cultures or selling out to capitalism, Polynesians who move to large foreign cities in search of work and other opportunities are breaking out of the narrow political and conceptual boxes colonialism made for them, and resuming the tradition of inter-island travel which flourished in pre-colonial times.

Quade Cooper's family are part of the great modern migration which Hau'ofa's most famous work celebrates: a decade ago they left Tokoroa, the depressed timber town in the south Waikato region of Te Ika a Maui, and settled in Queensland. Cooper’s father had lost his job after one of Tokoroa’s dwindling number of mills had closed, and he could see no future in New Zealand.

In Brisbane the young Cooper quickly became known as an uncommonly promising rugby player. Before he was twenty Cooper was playing for the Wallabies, and over the last couple of years he has become the side's star player.

Over the last few weeks, though, Quade Cooper's fame has turned, in New Zealand at least, to notoriety. From the time he stepped off the plane with the rest of Australia's World Cup Rugby Squad, Cooper has been the target of a stream of condemnation, mockery, and threats. Fans, sports commentators and pundits, and the coach of the All Blacks have all joined in the chorus of abuse. Facebook pages with names like I Hate Quade Cooper, Quade Cooper Traitor Disgrace and Kill Quade Cooper have appeared, unflattering photoshopped images of Cooper have been widely circulated, and a talkback host on the popular Radio Sport station has encouraged listeners to stalk and harrass Cooper as he moves through New Zealand with the Wallabies squad.

Instead of distancing themselves from the abuse of Cooper, New Zealand's rugby and media establishments have suggested that the young man deserves what he is getting. During a typically rambling, graceless press conference last weekend, Graham Henry said that Cooper had "brought a wee bit" of abuse on himself, and claimed that the player did not deserve to be respected by his opponents or by the New Zealand public. Henry's comments were reported reverently by the New Zealand media, which also mocked Cooper when he complained about 'getting it from all angles' during his time in this country. How can we explain the extraordinary outpouring of hatred against Quade Cooper in recent weeks? The Quade-haters typically explain their feelings by citing Cooper's New Zealand birth, his flamboyantly combative sporting persona, and the series of on-field clashes he has had with All Blacks captain Richie McCaw.

These excuses do not stand up to scrutiny.

Cooper may have been born in New Zealand, but he has lived in Australia since he was thirteen. It is curious that the Kiwis who label him a 'traitor' do not throw the same label at Wallabies coach Robbie Deans, who was born in this country, grew up here, played his rugby for Canterbury and the All Blacks, and then decided, after being passed over for the All Blacks coaching job in 2007, to cross the Tasman. Despite his much deeper ties with New Zealand and the blatant self-interest behind his defection to Australia, Deans remains a very popular figure in this country.

Cooper is a competitive player who likes to tease his opponents on and off the field. He has used a twitter account to celebrate Aussie victories and hit back at his critics after defeats. Sometimes Cooper seems intent on winding up All Blacks players and supporters. He has questioned the abilities of several All Blacks players, and he seems to enjoy talking while the New Zealand national anthem is being played before games.

But Cooper is hardly the first Aussie sportsman to have a cocky attitude. Many of Cooper's predecessors in the Wallabies have been admired for their cockiness. Back in the 1980s and early nineties David Campese regularly teased his opposite number John Kirwan and other All Blacks in the lead up to big trans-Tasman tests. But 'Campo' was celebrated as a 'character' who added to the colour of the game, not subjected to hate campaigns.

Cooper's clashes with Richie McCaw have been widely-publicised, but they have not gotten him into serious trouble with rugby administrators. After the final of the Tri-series competition in August Cooper was accused of maliciously kneeing McCaw in the head, but a disciplinary panel decided that his action was probably not deliberate. Many other players have committed far more egregious offences in recent years than Cooper. Quade Cooper is hated not for any legitimate reason, but because he unsettles the categories and assumptions beloved of many Pakeha rugby fans.

The All Blacks were one of the earlier integrated institutions in New Zealand, but traditionally there was an ethnic division of power within the team. For decades the All Blacks were nearly always captained by Pakeha. Maori were a loyal minority, except when the team toured South Africa, when they were dispensed with altogether. The All Blacks were often cited by politicians as a reflection of the country's supposed racial harmony, and many Pakeha internalised this notion.

In recent decades the growing diversity of New Zealand society, the increased power of Maori, and the professionalisation of rugby have all led to major changes in the All Blacks. Polynesians have sometimes been a majority in the team, the lure of foreign money has given players more power and made a number of them turn their backs on All Blacks careers, and repeated World Cup failures have reduced the mana of the team.

As observers like Chris Laidlaw have noted, the unease which many Kiwi rugby fans feel about the future of their game and team mirrors the uncertainty they feel about the economic and political future of their nation in the twenty-first century.

Amidst all the uncertainty of today's rugby world, Richie McCaw has come to seem, to many fans, a throwback to the glorious and safe days of the 1950s and '60s, when the All Blacks were consistently the best team in the world, and players never worried about contracts or sponsorship deals or their media image. With his rock jaw, old-fashioned haircut and sparse, homespun vocabulary, McCaw recalls heroes of yesteryear like Pinetree Meads and Brian Lochore. McCaw inspires extraordinary reverence amongst Kiwi rugby fans, and his team's quest for this year's World Cup has been portrayed, in the media and on fans' discussion fora, as a sort of effort at redemption, an attempt to revive a lost golden age.

McCaw is less popular outside New Zealand. Many overseas fans see him as a dirty player, who habitually lies on the wrong sides of rucks, daring referees to penalise him, and who has a penchant for throwing punches from the safety of the bottom of a maul.

New Zealand journalist Chris Rattue, who has a habit of dissenting from orthodox rugby opinion in this country, has suggested that the campaign against Quade Cooper began after the player 'got under the skins' of the All Blacks earlier this year. Cooper is, Rattue reckons, one of the 'very few people' who have been able to 'upset Richie McCaw'. Rattue believes that Cooper's flashy, unpredictable play and his willingness to take McCaw on physically and verbally rattled the All Blacks captain, who had become accustomed to intimidating his opponents.

Rattue suggests that McCaw began to give Cooper special attention, and that New Zealand rugby fans noticed his confrontations with the troublesome Aussie, took a hint, and began to direct their wrath towards Cooper.

Rattue's argument explains how Quade Cooper became a target for All Blacks supporters, but it does not explain the incredible intensity of the hatred for Cooper.

To explain the excesses of the campaign against Cooper we have to examine what he means to the Pakeha rugby fans who have been following, abusing, and threatening him. Cooper has expressed his pride in his ancestry, but he has no sentimental attachment to the All Blacks, and has no time for New Zealand nationalism.

Cooper is not even overly loyal to rugby: he seriously considered signing on with league team the Paramatta Eels last year, and was only kept in the rugby union fold by a one-year contract and the prospect of a World Cup. He has been tipped to defect to league next year.

As a brash, articulate young man proud to be Maori yet contemptuous of shibboleths of New Zealand identity like the All Blacks and the national anthem, Cooper confounds many assumptions still common amongst conservative Pakeha. He seems to them disloyal, self-centred, and aggressive. His confrontations with Richie McCaw, that embodiment of all that is pure in New Zealand society and rugby, are unforgivable.

At the same time that the media has been attacking Cooper, they have been busy praising Piri Weepu, the man who has become, in the absence of the injured Dan Carter, the most important part of the All Blacks backline.

A series of newspaper, radio and television profiles have discussed Weepu's continuing close connections with Wainuiomata, the poor outer Wellington neighbourhood where he was raised, and his decision to refuse the lure of foreign cash and remain in New Zealand and in the All Blacks. Weepu has been praised in rather patronising fashion for his 'loyalty' to his neighbourhood, his country, and his captain.

It is hard not see an implicit contrast being drawn between Cooper, the 'cheeky Maori' who turns out for a 'foreign' team, mocks the sacred symbols of New Zealand nationalism, and pursues his own interests, and the 'good Maori' Weepu, who knows his place and sticks to it.

But not everybody in this country hates Quade Cooper.

Epeli Hau'ofa celebrated emigrant Polynesians, and rejected charges that they were somehow self-centred or disloyal to the nation where they were born. Why, Hau’ofa indignantly asked, should people be criticised for refusing to be bound by lines on a map made by their colonisers? Why shouldn’t they take themselves and their culture wherever they want?

In much the same way, a number of Maori, including Tokoroan members of Cooper's Waikato iwi, have defended the player. Some have asked why Cooper should be expected to show loyalty to the New Zealand state which colonised his people, and to an All Blacks side which for long decades excluded Maori from leadership positions. In debates at the I Hate Quade Cooper Facebook page Cooper's defenders and detractors seem split along ethnic lines.

Ultimately, the hate campaign against Quade Cooper tells us more about the deformities of New Zealand society than it does about Cooper.

The real meaning of Rena

2011-10-17T00:30:00.027+13:00

The wreck of the cargo ship Rena on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga has managed the difficult feat of pushing the Rugby World Cup off the front pages of New Zealand newspapers, as journalists and opposition MPs talk about an 'environmental catastrophe' in the Bay of Plenty. The breakup of Rena and the appearance of oil and dead birds on the Bay's beaches is even set to erode poll support for the National government, if the latest report from ipredict can be trusted.

The accident off Tauranga is certainly lamentable. Nobody likes the sight of oil-flecked beaches and dead birds. In context, though, the wreck hardly rates as an environmental disaster. It has closed a handful of beaches, and killed about a thousand birds. But as many as twenty-five million birds are killed by predators - stoats, ferrets, rats, cats, dogs - every year in New Zealand, and whole lakes and streams in regions like the Waikato have been rendered off-limits by pollution from dairy farms. I'd rather try to swim off Tauranga than at Ngaroto, the historic lake southwest of Hamilton which has for years now been infested by noxious weeds fed by the poisons that flow and seep from surrounding farms.

National's handling of the Rena wreck certainly seems to have lacked competence and compassion - Steve Joyce, the overburdened Minister charged with responding to the wreck, didn't even turn up in Tauranga until four days after the event - but that is hardly surprising. National has failed to offer any practical response to the impact of the global economic crisis on this country, and its reactions to the Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River Mine explosion have not been particularly empathetic.

Why, then, has there been such an outcry over the wreck off Tauranga? Why is this and not some other issue eroding support for the government? To answer these questions we have to consider the peculiar way many New Zealanders see their country, and the peculiar but not quite unprecedented relationship they have developed with John Key over the past three years.

In one of the many caustic asides in his relentlessly amusing autobiography The Gatekeeper, Terry Eagleton mocked the obsession that middle class Westerners have with their health. Eagleton pointed out that the advocates of 'detoxification' and special diets and other fads always present sickness as some alien presence inside the body. 'Health' is, for neurotic Westerners, all about guarding the body against alien intrusion. The notions that sickness might be the flipside of health, and that certain illnesses might be inevitable, are anathema to many contemporary Westerners.

It seems to me that New Zealanders - Pakeha New Zealanders, in particular - have long had a tendency to think about their island nation as something apart from, and in many respects better than, the rest of the world. This tendency has been encouraged by the relative isolation of New Zealand, and by the way it avoided the foreign occupations and revolutions which were visited on so many other countries at one or another time in the twentieth century. New Zealand is a healthy body, we think, and if it becomes sick, the sickness will have come from outside.

During times of crisis the need of Kiwis to think themselves apart from and safe from the rest of the world becomes particularly intense. During the Great Depression of the 1930s New Zealanders developed a deep affection for Michael Joseph Savage, the outwardly amiable leader of the country's first Labour government. Savage's government is remembered nowadays for its progressive reforms, but these measures were largely the work of left-wing Cabinet Ministers like John A Lee rather than the Prime Minister. Savage's popularity came from the kindly, almost avuncular image he projected to voters, and from his ability to assure them that New Zealand would be spared the wholesale destitution and the civil wars which the Depression was inspiring elsewhere.

Over the past three years the determinedly affable John Key has managed to be, like Savage, a reassuring figure in a time of crisis. Again and again he has told Kiwis that their country is different from and apart from the rest of the world, and won't suffer the economic meltdowns and social turmoil seen in places like Iceland, Greece and Spain. The idea that economic and political crises might arise in New Zealand because of contradictions already present inside our country - the contradiction between capital and labour, and between the dictates of the market and the needs of communities - seems as alien to Key as it still is to most Kiwis. The wreck of Rena has cast doubt on Key's reassurances of safety. On a practical level, the wreck has shown that twenty-first century New Zealand, with its globalised, deindustrialised and deregulated economy, struggles to deal even with a minor environmental emergency. On a symbolic level, the wreck of the Rena represents the invasion of the healthy body of New Zealand by a dangerous alien. With its dodgy captain, Liberian flag of convenience, low wage Third World crew, and leaking oil, the Rena is the emissary of a chaotic and deeply undesirable outside world.

Is it a surprise that the crew of Rena, who were blameless for the mistakes of their captain, were subjected to so much public vitriol and so many threats of violence that they quickly had to be spirited out of New Zealand? The reception given to these men shows us the paranoia and xenophobia which go hand in hand with New Zealanders' sense of themselves as apart from and safe from the rest of the world.

The response to the wreck on Astrolabe Reef also shows the fragility of the government's popularity. If the public begins to suspect that John Key is incapable of keeping New Zealand safe from alien forces, or if it begins to suspect that New Zealand has its own, homegrown crises brewing, then it will turn on National.

[Posted by Maps]

Education and neo-colonialism in Nauru

2011-10-14T09:44:00.021+13:00

[For most of the week just passed my father-in-law, the educationalist and veteran folk musician Alan Wagstaff, was lodged in our spare bedroom, as he waited for the birth of his first grandson (the boy, who is my first nephew, was finally born last night: like my second niece Rita, he bears the name of a famous modernist painter).

Alan defected from mainstream education to the Steiner movement soon after graduating from a British teachers' training college in the late '60s. After a few years' service in the old country, he and his wife Ruth emigrated to New Zealand, where they helped found Auckland's first Steiner school (their daughter has blogged about her time at Michael Park Primary here).

Although he broke from the Steiner movement more than a decade ago, after deciding it was hopelessly contaminated by the dogmatism and the peculiar supernatural beliefs of its founder, Alan has remained a critic of mainstream education in the West. He recently opened a twitter page, where he launches broadsides against the educational establishment, and polemicises in favour of the practices of Silkwood Independent School, the Queensland institution where he works as an advisor on curriculum.

Alan came to the Steiner movement as a refugee from the rote learning of facts and figures and the corporal punishment which were the stock in trade of schools in the 1960s. The strap and cane may have been banished from most Western schools in the twenty-first century, but Alan is convinced that the 'National Standards' testing which is being foisted on teachers in Britain and in Australasia is forcing a return to the authoritarian and inefficient methods of rote learning. "The idea that all children can learn at the same rate is a nonsense" he told me the other night, as we sipped coffee and waited for a call from the hospital down the road. "And the idea that something as subtle as early learning can be measured by something as crude as a statistic is also nonsense. National Standards forces teachers to spend most of their time feeding children information to help them pass tests which measure nothing. And the kids who are out of sync with the 'learn the same way on the same day' model demanded by National Standards - the kids who are ahead of the pack and the kids who are left behind, academically speaking - well, those kids make trouble, and classrooms become dysfunctional. Kids have to learn at their own pace - and the curriculum has to engage with their interests, their world, their cultures."

Alan's views on National Standards certainly seem to be shared by many educators in this country: teachers' unions have taken a strong line against the system, and a recent study suggested that a third of schools are refusing outright to implement it.

I didn't want to share Vaughan Rapatahana's articles about the education system on Nauru with Alan earlier this week, because I thought he was under enough stress waiting for the birth of his grandson. The idiocies being perpetrated under the name of education in Nauru might have been too much for him to bear.

I posted Vaughan's article about his experience at a Nauruan school in the late '70s and early '80s last week. The following article, which I've abridged slightly, was written after Vaughan's return visit to the struggling island-state in 2010, and reveals that, partly as a result of the neo-colonial policies of Australia, the shortcomings of the Nauruan school system have become even more pronounced in recent years. If National Standards is homogenising education and alienating children in the West, then the imposition of an utterly alien curriculum and the refusal to engage with local culture has led to the mass desertion of Nauruan schools.

Vaughan's article isn't only a lament: drawing on his knowledge of New Zealand's te reo Maori and kohanga reo movements, he makes some suggestions about how the sorry situation in Nauruan schools might be turned around. I think Vaughan and my father-in-law should have a beer sometime...]

A Personal Reflection: Return to The Republic, February, 2010

Vaughan Rapatahana

Thirty years after my stint as a native-speaking teacher of English in Nauru, I returned for a visit, an update. It was the least that I could do to give a fair appraisal of the island. I undertook to read as much as I could about Nauru, especially pertaining to English-language education...

Many things had changed by 2010. Many. Yet, in a sense, many things were still the same. Nauruans remained good people, with what would have to be unlimited patience, given the disastrous economic tsunami that wiped out their salaries and resources for about ten years from 1995-2005, the ramifications of which continue to plague the island. Lots of administrative paperwork and proclamations – many available on the web – had been churned out, with little real, visceral effect, for example the 1995 Nauru Curriculum Footpath, and the 1997 Nauru Education for the 21st Century, whilst politics remained a crazy game of musical chairs between – among others - Marcus Stephen and Ludwig Scotty.

A lot of rain had fallen recently, and days were overcast, with only flashes of the diurnal blistering heat I remembered.

The airport runway was longer – courtesy of a New Zealand work crew some years before. I had always used to wonder how aeroplanes ever managed to land there without sliding into the sea.

However there was also a lot missing:

- Most Kiribati and Tuvaluans had been returned to their respective homelands in 2006, when it was apparent that there was no money to back-pay them. This repatriation – and their payment – was organized by the South Pacific Forum. The workers' living quarters had subsequently been taken over by Nauruan residents.

- There was no Staff Club anymore – it had been transmogrified into a church. An absurd irony, if you reflect for just a moment.

- There was no more Bank of Nauru: apparently money-mismanagement had made it insolvent.

- There was no more grocery store in the Civic Centre, in fact not much at all in the Civic Centre these days. The best grocery store by far now is Capelles, which is flourishing and four times its size in 1979 ... it’s also a hotel. And a car hire centre too, or so it says outside.

- There is only one aeroplane in Our Airlines, but the replacement for Air Nauru is a fine little airline. I found it very professional, serving very good food with convivial staff ... Actually, Our Airlines does have a second plane, wearing Norfolk Island livery, which is utilized as a charter between Norfolk Island and the Australian mainland.

- There is no more expatriate housing, except for some non-European Nauru Secondary School staff, who are put up at the sadly rundown and expensive Menen Hotel. Our lights went off one night and no land line telephones were available – mind you, most people now used mobiles. There was no TV reception whatsoever and an interesting minimalist menu was available, although the food was tasty.

- All expatriate homes were returned to Nauru in 2000 and many of the ones the expatriates used to live in - including those in upscale Menen Terrace – are now back in Nauruan habitation. Some houses, however, including the very first home we lived in way back in 1979, were decrepit and overgrown and had no inhabitants whatsoever.

- There is also no more Menen channel: now there is a newish (courtesy of Japan) boat harbour there ... I couldn’t swim unhampered by rock pinnacles like I used to, at least in Anibare Bay.

- There were no more Harleys or loud pumping SUVs and Landrovers. Now there were only small-cc motorbikes and a noticeable dearth of brand new motor vehicles. Mind you, there was also a dearth of empty beer cans. Nauru seemed to me to be much tidier than when I first lived there. Much quieter too, I guess. Less to celebrate nowadays, I surmise...

The Police Commissioner is an Australian, and I was told that the jail is full. A vicious murder or two had blighted the country recently. In 2004, in return for $22.5million over two years, Australia actually installed a Secretary of Finance and appointed a Police Commissioner … there are very strong shades of re-colonization in the republic nowadays. I even heard further rumours of the current Australian administration approaching Nauru to once more ‘host’ the infamous ‘refugee centre’, the Pacific’s own Guantanamo Bay!

New Government House/buildings have been built since I was last there. They are nice, to coin a word.

Kayser College now has classes from pre-school (called ‘infant school’ there) through to Year 10. We also drove past a new Nauru College for primary students.

Nauru Secondary School had been temporarily relocated to the former ‘Pacific Solution’ refugee camp, while a multimillion dollar newer and larger NSS was being built with AusAID revenue. It was due to open in March, 2010 during a visit of Taiwan's Premier. (Taiwanese aid to Nauru is also apparent in the pig and chicken station not far from Capelles.) Apparently there is lots of truancy now – even more than when I was there. I guess that kids (and parents) think ‘what’s the point of going to school?’ - particularly when over 90% of the population are without work...

I heard later in 2010, that yes, the new school has been reopened on the site of the old school.

In 2009, Papua-New Guinean teachers complained bitterly about a lack of consistent salary payment, about being accommodated at a Menen Hotel with no cooking facilities, about racist taunting, about everything being ‘in Nauruan’ language', and about their ‘original’ contracts being abrogated on their arrival on the island. All of this sounded very familiar.

The situation of education in Nauru is, perhaps, best summarized in a National Assessment report from 2004:

Despite the substantive investment in education over 36 years, there is still a huge gap in quantity of trained workers across the various disciplines … At present the reality of the education system is somewhat different from the ideal. The education system in Nauru is failing to produce Nauruans competent to deal with the future. There is a lack of continuity, relevance and of a culturally appropriate curriculum – which, combined contribute to academic failure, loss of identity and sense of purpose. Schools and training facilities are dilapidated and poorly equipped, and there is over-crowding in classrooms. As a matter of fact, significant numbers of Nauruans are illiterate in English and have a poor command of Nauruan. Collaboration between teachers and parents is intermittent … (pp. 32-37).

The Director of Education is yet another Australian trying to bring in – absurdly – the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) curriculum! What the relevance of this is to a sovereign independent state like the Republic of Nauru, with its own indigenous culture and language, totally escapes me. It is now 2010...

Nauruan is still NOT an official language! There are conflicts over its approved historical version, over its orthography. Perhaps Maori education in Aotearoa could be utilized as an exemplar: Maori have, to some extent, regained control of their education, their mana, via their own language, te reo Maori, as taught by Maori in nga kura kaupapa (schools with Maori subject matter taught in Maori by Maori). However, this model is exactly that – merely a model. Nauru can streamline its own system so as to best support, maintain and nurture into full fruition its own language. It surely must be tino rangatiratanga (total self-determination) time for Nauru.

There is an expectation of five more years of phosphate mining and 25 years of secondary mining on Nauru. In early 2010 the Government had stabilized somewhat – despite the possibility of another coup d’etat when we were there, which thankfully did not transpire - and Nauruans now felt the water at about chest level, and not over their nostrils, like they had just a few years earlier, when the country had been listed by the USA as a ‘rogue state’, because the many passport selling and money laundering schemes extant there.

No. Not drowning anymore, but the water swilling around is still far too deep and there are too many sharks circling...

Nauruans remain friendly people. When we ran out of gas one afternoon there was no problem in finding someone willing to just drop everything and go and buy some more gas for us – and they had to be almost forced into taking some dollars. I spoke to loquacious (in more than one language), intelligent locals – among them Maria Gaiyabu, Julie Olsson, Tim Angimea, Paul Finch, Chinese restauranters – people who are more than capable of handling their island’s own destiny.

Yet, when once there was happy singing everywhere, now Nauruans still sing, “but the happy songs have gone”. Then there is Topside, the old phosphate-mining area...Topside remains a bitter ironic symbol, a devastated landscape ultimately only serving to make non-Nauruan fields greener, more fertile, richer. Like daytime vampires the colonial powers robbed one land to make their own plains flourish. I have alluded to Australian recolonization already, but the Peoples Republic of China, Taiwan and now it seems also Russia are also rubbing their hands and looking at Nauru – and an Indian-run private company, Getax, is also involved in supposed financial finagling …

My hope is that the Republic of Nauru can remain on its track to stability, that it can gain full control over its destiny, incorporating a system of education of relevance through a medium of relevance. Nauru did not ask for the relentless manifest and latent colonial and postcolonial pillaging of its physical, mental and spiritual resources.

As of now, Nauru remains a signal symbol of rampant neo-colonialist greed. The agents, especially, of the English language are big bad bullies indeed.

Lost: a literary treasure, last seen in Tonga

2011-10-13T11:27:00.009+13:00

In his cult 2002 movie The Stone Reader, Baby Boomer Mark Moskowitz told the story of his obsession with an obscure novel he had read in his youth, and of his long journey in search of the author of that book, who turned out to be living as a recluse in a small town in the American Midwest.

Moskowitz's search for Dow Mossman wasn't easy, but he did at least begin his journey holding a copy of Mossman's one and only book. The Stones of Summer may have been out of print for decades, but the information on its jacket and on its opening pages guided Moskowitz to a series of people - a publisher, a photographer, a retired creative writing teacher with a passion for greyhound racing - who were able to give him stories about Dow Mossman, as well as offer guesses about the man's location.

Since 1997 Anne Amundsen has been searching for a long-lost book and author, but her task is more daunting than the one Mark Moskowitz faced. Anne is searching for a novel she remembers reading in the middle years of the 1980s, when she lived with her diplomat husband in Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga. She remembers the book's locations, and a good deal of its plot, but not its name or author.

A friend of Anne recently sent a description of the book she is hunting to the e mail loop of the Tonga Research Group. Because this blog is haunted by bibliophiles - Jack Ross, who has made an online catalogue for his vast private library, and Richard Taylor, who lives and works amidst book-rubble, are both regular commenters - I offered to post Anne's message here, in the hope that she might get the sort of help which made Mark Moskowitz's quest an ultimately successful one.

Here's Anne's e-mail:

For a decade now I have been searching for a missing book, based in Tonga. It was definitely fiction - it was definitely 'located' in Tonga - and my uncle was definitely mentioned (without doubt). My search for this book is entirely on account of the reference to my uncle, which I feel my family should be able to read and treasure. Regrettably all I can remember is that . . . :

The book I am trying to find was read by me when we lived in Nuku'alofa between 1985-1987 (my husband was the New Zealand High Commissioner at that time). After reading the book, I lent it to a Tongan who did not return it to me, although my husband also read it before it went AWOL! As you will see from the details below, the story was based in Tonga. My extensive enquiries, over the years since, have led me to believe that nobody in Tonga has read this book (apart from my husband and me)! This is surprising, since it was very exciting. Being located in Tonga it is amazing to me that nobody there seems to know anything at all about this book! Any assistance would be enormously appreciated, thank you.

1) It is a NOVEL, not historical fact. Published no later than 1987, but more likely no later than 1986.

2) It is 'located' in TONGA - I think some of the characters 'stayed' at the Dateline Hotel.

3) Some action takes place underwater in the Tonga Trench.

4) Hong Kong somehow comes into the story because in this novel is mentioned my uncle, Captain Bob (Robert) Newton of the 5th/7th Rajput Regiment, Indian Army, who was killed in Hong Kong during the Japanese invasion of 1941. His heroic death, under fire, is chronicled in this book - quite extraordinary, since the book is fictional and about TONGA - not Hong Kong .

5) I think the book is a thriller (or possibly science fiction, though less likely).

6) It has to have been published in 1987 or prior to that (definitely not later).

7) However, books which it is NOT, are:

Friendly Isles: a tale of Tonga , by Patricia Ledyard, Vava'u Press 1984 - NO.
On Their Majesties Service, by Captain C.H. Hill-Willis, Neptune Press 1983 - NO
The Fire Has Jumped, edited by Garth Rogers, Institute of Pacific Studies 1986 - NO
Lost Paradise, Ian Cameron, Salem House Publications, Topsfield , Mass. , 1987. NO
Night of Error, by Desmond Bagley, St. Martins 1987 - NO.
Solomon's Seal, by Hammond Innes, Collins 1980. - NO
Sphere, by Michael Crichton, Knopf 1987. - NO
Steel Tiger, by Stirling Silliphant, Ballantine 1983 - NO
Pacific Odyssey, by Gwenda Cornell, Coles 1985 - NO
Rascals in Paradise by James A. Michener - NO
Tempest and Torment by Graeme Clarke - NO
The Trulove (O'Brian) - NO
Peking Incident (Atcheson)- NO
Lighter Than A Feather (Westheimer) - NO
Shanghai (Marshall) - NO
The Admiral (Dibner)- NO

Yours faithfully

Anne Ammundsen

Getting beyond dogma

2011-10-10T12:23:00.022+13:00

Five years ago the political historian Paul Blackledge published a critique of EP Thompson and the New Left movement in International Socialism, the journal of Britain's Socialist Workers Party. Although I had enjoyed some of Blackledge's writings, I thought that his essay was far too one-sided in its assessment of Thompson and the unstable but energetic movement of ex-communists and student radicals that Thompson helped lead in the late fifties and early sixties. Blackledge seemed to me to be motivated not by a desire to assess Thompson's thought fairly, but by a determination to show that the Socialist Workers Party's political ancestors were the most virtuous and right-thinking section of the New Left. Blackledge seemed, in other words, to be guided by dogmatism rather than by scholarship.

I wrote a reply to Blackledge's essay, and that reply wound up as a chapter in my PhD thesis about Thompson, although it didn't sneak into my recently published book on the great man.

A couple of years ago the Socialist Workers Party split down the middle, in the time-honoured fashion of far left outfits. A group of former members of the party established a very busy website called Counterfire, where they publish political news and analysis as well as the odd book review (the site's coverage of the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street protests in the US is well worth checking out).

Looking at the books page of Counterfire this morning, I spotted a hostile review of my tome on Thompson from a chap named Dominic Alexander. Where Paul Blackledge used the SWP's press to make a strong criticism of EP Thompson, Alexander has used Counterfire to defend the late historian from what he perceives as my relentlessly negative tone. Where Blackledge could see little that was good about Thompson's political thought, Alexander appears to consider it almost faultless.

Blackledge and Alexander may nowadays sympathise with different organisations, and they may have diametrically opposed views of EP Thompson's politics, but they seem to me to be guilty of the same one-sided approach to political history.

To their credit, the Counterfire crew allows comments to be posted under the book reviews which appear on their site. Here's an extended version of the comment I left under Dominic Alexander's review:

I thank Dominic Alexander for giving my book a read, however cursory, but he does seem to have misinterpreted the attitude I take towards EP Thompson.

A closer look at my book would reveal that I have a very high regard for both Thompson's scholarly and political work. Alexander's claim that I'm some sort of ruthless critic out to seize every opportunity to belittle the great man hasn't been shared by other reviewers, including reviewers who were friends and colleagues of Thompson. In her piece for Reviews in History, for instance, Penelope Corfield recommends my book as an introduction to Thompson's achievements. And the late Dorothy Thompson not only assisted with the preparation of my book but considered it a fair overview of her late husband's work.

What Alexander seems to object to is the fact that I make any serious criticisms at all of Thompson. He picks up on some of my negative judgments on particular texts and political episodes, takes them out of their contexts, and then presents them as symptoms of a morbid generalised hostility.

For instance, Alexander objects to my use of the phrase 'English exceptionalism' at one point in my book. Taking my use of this phrase out of context, he suggests that I've glibly dismissed Thompson's longstanding commitment to internationalist politics and his profound interest in the history and sociology of Third World nations.

Alexander notes the way that Thompson invokes the contemporary Third World at the beginning of The Making of the English Working Class, and expresses the hope that the battles which were lost in early modern England might be won in the Third World. I thank Alexander for trying to bring this passage to my attention, but if he reads my book carefully he'll see that I repeatedly cite it, as an example of Thompson's concern with non-English and non-European societies.

I use the phrase 'English exceptionalism' not to sum up Thompson's worldview, but in the context of a discussion of his political and intellectual isolation in the aftermath of the collapse of the first New Left in the early sixties. I explicitly contrast Thompson's claim that The Making of the English Working Class is relevant not just to England but to large parts of the world with his repeated claim, in the mid-sixties essay 'Peculiarities of the English', that there is a gulf between English history and the history of other nations.

Thompson's undeniable retreat into an exceptionalist position in 'Peculiarities' simply cannot be squared with the optimistic internationalising of English experience which is seen in the opening pages of The Making of the English Working Class.

The sort of contradiction I've just noted is found throughout Thompson's oeuvre and also in his life. Thompson wrote with unparalleled power about English history, but wasn't always sure how to relate his historical texts to the present. He was a charismatic political leader, but also a chronic feuder who fell out needlessly with allies. He lambasted the conservatism of English universities, but sometimes struggled to take a constructive attitude to the student protesters of the late '60s and early '70s. He wrote brilliantly about the threats to English civil liberties in the 1970s but had nothing to say about Bloody Sunday and the internment of hundreds of civilians on the other side of the Irish Sea. He alternated between wild political optimism and an almost apocalyptic despair about the future. He wrote majestic prose, but also some dodgy poetry. Faced with the obvious contradictions between the different texts Thompson left behind, and between different aspects of Thompson's life, we have a choice. We can either use one or another variety of dogma to simplify his life and work, or we can try to reconstruct the twists and turns of thought and fate which produced his contradictions, and try to understand which of his ideas we might usefully develop today.

Alexander complains that I haven't reproduced the interpretation of Thompson which the Canadian scholar Bryan D Palmer offers in his two books on the man, but if he reads the introduction to my book again he'll notice that I fault Palmer for taking an excessively reverential attitude towards Thompson, and for failing to notice the complexity and contradiction which were part of Thompson's life and work. Palmer's books on Thompson contain much useful information, and their sincerity cannot be questioned, but they do seem to me to verge on hagiography.

As I say repeatedly in my book, the left has seen too much of hagiography. The sad case of Karl Marx, whose oeuvre was misrepresented by Stalinists and Cold Warriors alike for much of the twentieth century, ought to alert us to the dangers of producing one official version of a great thinker's career, and ignoring complexity and contradiction.

Since the end of the Cold War Marxology and the study of Marxist history seem to me to have flourished, as scholars like James White, Karl Anderson, and Lars Lih have freed themselves from the old orthodoxy which said that Marx's work was all of a piece, and was either completely correct or terribly wrong. They have shown the way that Marx and later thinkers inspired by Marx adopted, developed, and discarded ideas, in response both to political pressures and to research findings. In my own small way, I have tried to do something similar with EP Thompson.

And I'd argue that Thompson, like Marx, is relevant to the left of the twenty-first century precisely because his work is dynamic and contradictory. Thompson and Marx are like early explorers, who made maps of the country which we find ourselves traversing today. The maps they left us plot the locations of many key landmarks, but also contain some faulty markings, and many blank spaces which need filling.

Thompson and Marx were both aware of how incomplete their explorations were, and it is their intellectual realism, their willingness to retreat from error and recalibrate a theory, their preparedness to leave spaces for others to explore, which distinguishes them from the sort of dogmatic thinkers who produce static, non-contradictory texts. We read Marx's Capital rather than Karl Kautsky's dully encyclopedic opus The Materialist Conception of History precisely because Capital is, in spite of the best efforts of Engels, an unfinished, open-ended work, the record of an adventure rather than a closed theorectical system. The Making of the English Working Class is a collection of passionate case studies, not some attempt at an exhaustive, pseudo-objective map of early industrial England, but its very incompleteness, its refusal of the false confidence of the sweeping generalisation, adds to its vitality. Scholarship is always better than dogmatism.

Vaughan Rapatahana on Nauru

2011-10-07T20:20:00.002+13:00

[Last month I posted an interview with Vaughan Rapatahana, the poet, educationalist, and language activist who lives in Hong Kong but considers the small town of Te Araroa near the East Cape of Te Ika a Maui to be his home.

After I interviewed him Vaughan sent me a couple of articles in which he reflects on his visits to the Micronesian nation of Nauru. The first article was first published in the Post Primary Teachers Association Journal in 1983; Vaughan has added some asides on recent Nauruan history to it. Vaughan's second article, which I'll post next week, records a return visit to the island in 2010.

Vaughan has been busy lately putting together The English Language as Hydra, a book of essays by a range of scholars about the threats which Anglicisation and globalisation pose to the languages and cultures of the Pacific.]

Yes, I went to Nauru: 1979 - 1981

by Vaughan Rapatahana

Yes, I went to Nauru. I went there in April, 1979 to “teach English”. I have never been the same since.

I was a young, relatively naïve and inexperienced teacher at a school in the north of New Zealand, who after two and a bit years felt restless, bored, impatient, a little dissatisfied with the sheer racial bias against/ignorance of things Maori. Yet, I had two young children, a fine new schoolhouse with a cheap rental and I enjoyed my job and the company of the teachers I worked with. At least most of them.

So why Nauru?

One afternoon, in the ‘Situations Vacant’ column of the NZ Herald, I noticed an advertisement calling for teachers for Nauru Secondary School, Central Pacific. I applied, probably more in a fit of ennui than anything else, and thought nothing more of it. Later that year I was contacted by Nauru’s Senior Administrative Officer (the ex-Town Clerk of Ashburton, New Zealand). Would my wife and I come down to Auckland for an interview? Sure. So off we went. We asked a few questions, he mumbled a few replies and gave us a large wad of money as expenses.

Soon after, I was told that I had the job. After a bit of frantic fact-finding – for few people had even heard of the place – we decided to go. Why not? I gave and served the requisite two months notice, and as a bonus received two year’s leave of absence from a generous school board. We were off.

On reflection, I can only say that my motives were greed – good, tax free money on Nauru – and adventure. I guess I’d read too many Biggles books or something. Certainly there was no element of ‘helping the natives’, given that I had a particularly indigenous insight into things anyway. On reflection, I was symptomatic perhaps of expatriates everywhere, although I would like to think that I was more culturally sensitive and aware than most.

We climbed onto an Air NZ jet and were whisked away to Fiji for a two-day stopover before an Air Nauru flight to the island. Back then, Air Nauru operated more than the sometimes mechanically bedeviled aeroplanes it now has, although back then also, Hammer deRoubert, the island’s leader, was prone to commandeering planes for shopping trips to Hong Kong, whilst their transient passengers were left temporarily stranded as longer-term tourists on Nauru!

My first impression of the 12 square mile (21 square kilometer) island was one of heat: it was bloody hot. A welcome of sorts from a newly appointed Headmaster, from Wellington, N.Z, and we were shunted off to an upstairs flat where a few supplies had been laid on and where the fans only seemed to stir up the heat. This was to be our home for “a couple of months” while our house – in an exclusively expatriate government workers’ settlement on the other side of the island – was readied i.e. painted. We had no car and there was no public transport. There was only one supermarket, which specialized in not having much of anything except weevils, corned beef and a roof that leaked directly onto the counter whenever the infrequent, but heavy, rains came. This supermarket, by the way, had fresh vegetables delivered only once a week – on a Saturday morning – and it was then that a selfish melee used to break out among the expatriates and the local Chinese to be the first to score a cabbage.

There was a Staff Club, the bastion of many of the white male population of Nauru, who drank the pink gins served up by one Lee Kit, the fulsomely ever-smiling barman, who knew only enough English to serve the drinks and to mouth obscenities at those patrons who seriously tested his patience during rush hours. Alcohol was extremely cheap: a can of Fosters beer was only 22 cents back then, whilst Fanta was 30 cents. Nauruans scarcely ever went to the Staff Club, whilst Europeans scarcely ever went to the many seaside open bars, which littered the island almost as much as the empty and rusty beer cans they generated. I used to frequent Bill’s Bar a fair bit, however – it was owned and often operated by one of the island’s medical practitioners.

Then there was Nauru Secondary School.

I was “given” 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E. 2E was very much what they sounded like. All classes were a mixture of Nauruans, Kiribats and Tuvaluans - with a few Europeans thrown in. The Kiribats and Tuvaluans were the children of the labourers on Topside (the phosphate diggings on the central, barren plateau of Nauru). They were often the hardest working: they had more to gain, for they had to return to their own economically poorer islands and any education was an advantage to them as scholarships could go their way. Their parents bore the brunt of poor living conditions on the island – they often had small flats with no power and water (and more recently, during a few economically destitute years in the Republic, they had no money either, as there has been none to paid them - nor to the white expatriates, for that matter).

As for the Nauruan students – they covered a wide spectrum, although the most academically left on scholarships to Australia, and the scions of the wealthy elite (generally politicians) were sent away to study in expensive boarding schools. That left some very bright and very diligent students, some bright and diffident students, some bright and psychologically ‘maladjusted’ students, and some non-existent students. This latter group was the quite large truant student body. I saw one pupil attend class only twice during the entire time I was at the school.

Always it was hot. Only the science ‘labs’ sometimes had air conditioning. There was no one room for me that first year. I had to chug my way around various, often dilapidated, often filthy classrooms, with the few resources that made any relevant sense, or that were complete. I stumbled over the truant student body in all manner of bizarre places, often with a disgruntled teacher or Acting Principal/Acting Deputy Principal (everyone in Nauru seemed to be ‘acting’ something or other!) in hot pursuit – sometimes through and over the graders and trucks and diggers in the adjacent Ministry of Works. Discipline, at least initially, was through physical intimidation. Nauruans respected strength and ‘macho man’ tendencies.

And always, right outside the school, was the airstrip. Everything stopped as we watched planes rumble on and off the tarmac, whilst we, perspiring profusely, wondered if this would be the plane that didn’t actually land or take off on time.

There was no curriculum. Several times, attempts were made to get something started, but they all failed due to staff turnover of about 20 expatriates a year, a turnover which was itself due to natural terminations of contracts, enforced terminations of contract, resignation, and in one case sheer insanity - a New Zealand teacher who had been banned from teaching in his home country had to be strait-jacketed onto an awaiting aeroplane. Local teachers were few and far between and only three or four at any given time had ever been ‘trained’. (Eventually, at least at Primary level, a Nauru curriculum was introduced.)

More than this though, the curriculum failure was due to the fact that those at the top were unwilling to take effective control. The Nauruan hierarchy wanted, or had been persuaded to support, a system based on the one that operated in the Australian state of Victoria, as many of them had won their own scholarships to that state in their early years.
But the Victorian system was irrelevant to Nauru, and in particular to its one secondary school and the one private Catholic Kayser College. What was called for was a uniquely Nauruan curriculum, incorporating, for example, Nauruan language, which was slowly being lost along with other aspects of the culture like songs, dance and weaving. Indeed the Nauruan language was then scarcely extant in any comprehensive written form.

There were infrequent examinations and reports. There was officially no corporal punishment: the Principal’s only official, and ‘ultimate’ punishment was a one-hour suspension! There was, at times, chronic vandalism of the classrooms – inside and out. There were no playing fields, no gymnasium. There was frequent theft of equipment from most departments – not always by students, as certain expatriates hoarded and dispatched large treasure troves homewards. There were occasional physical threats, and once or twice these came from pupils against staff. Because of the constant toing-and-froing of Headmasters – including the guy who had greeted me –there was often no leadership.

In my two-and-a-bit-year stint, there were five Principals or Acting ones or Deputy ones – everyone had a turn, even me, by my second year, when I was already H.O.D. of English (my predecessor in that role, the wife of the Principal who met me, had found everything “too hot”). Everyone had a turn. Some were efficient, some the complete opposite. We, as a staff, never really knew what was going on. Dawson Murray, for example, arrived mid-1980 and immediately the whole school (remembering that the other schools on Nauru, i.e. infant and primary, were mirror images of Nauru Secondary School) took on a more positive tone. N.S.S was repainted, repaired and its ‘difficult’ pupils were dealt with. However, Dawson was sacked quite soon afterwards for ostensibly being too critical, and maintaining too high a profile.

The Nauruans are a proud people and, after years of sublimation by Europeans - initially by Germans and later by Britons, Australians and New Zealanders - they were independent, and felt no desire to have their former ‘masters’ and plunderers of the phosphate criticise, albeit helpfully, their system or lack of it.

After Dawson went, having been given two days’ notice (as were others later), things returned to the norm of absenteeism amongst pupils and staff, and the frustrations of trying to get some guidelines from senior administration in the Government offices right next door. We returned to coping as best we could. Remember that English was the second language for most pupils and the first for most of the staff: some pupils were illiterate in English.

Yet there was a good deal on the positive side. There was some quite outstanding work from many pupils and some overseas trips of great worth. There were excellent athletics competitions on Topside, Round the Island Relays, and swimming competitions. House rivalry was intense and in the choral competitions everyone gave their best. And there was also an extremely generous annual budget allocation. (Of course, nowadays, with phosphate royalties drying up and all the investments from them squandered and mortgaged to the hilt, there is insufficient money for education.)

By the end of our first year, we had come to grips with the ‘way of life’. School wasn’t too bad and the money – comparatively – was good, so we bought bourgeois possessions like a new car, a waterbed, a new stereo, exotic furniture and so on. There was no import duty or sales tax and consequently plenty of kitsch things to spend one’s money on. We could go to the ‘beach’, in reality a bulldozed channel through the rocks, or go snorkeling over the reef to the tepid deeps. There was plenty of socialising and copious parties, although it was noticeable that there was little intermingling with the local community, other than getting Kiribati baby-sitters. The mail order catalogues were abundant and the houses weren’t too bad. One either adjusted or blew up and got off the island as soon as one could, although many expatriates had overextended themselves financially and were thus forced to stay longer than they would have liked. (At least they knew they would be paid – it is far different there now!) Still, there were also quite arbitrary contract changes, one of which ensued at the end of 1979 when the contractually assigned three months’ leave was cut back to two months. If we didn’t accept this we were ‘down the road’. Some took that route, thankful for their escape. Over 8,000 people on a tiny island can indeed get to you and we were only manuhiri (guests) after all!

As noted earlier, I became Coordinator of English in 1980, mainly because I was the only suitable applicant for the position and I had to draw up the school timetable for that year. It needed constant restructuring, however, due to class closures and staff disappearances. Here I was, at 26, being involved in aspects of school administration that I would not have been exposed to, nor involved with, in a New Zealand situation for years or, indeed, at all. Bizarre? No, not really – this was just Nauru.

And this is the crux of the whole matter.

You see, there were/are always two cultures rubbing against each other in every aspect of life on Nauru Island. Over the years I have noticed similar culture clashes in stints in other places, such as Brunei Darussalam, UAE, PR China, Hong Kong and the East Coast of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

On Nauru, the disparate cultures rarely gelled. There was a contrast between on the one hand the WASP New Zealand culture of most of the teaching staff and their heritage of British-styled exams, curriculum, discipline, resources and on the other hand the far more laid-back resignation of the students, the few Nauruan staff, and the educational hierarchy. Here were two distinctly different ways of seeing, conceptualizing, prioritizing, of Being. The Nauruans had seen Europeans – and the odd Maori – come and go forever. They (the Nauruans) were still there. It was always hot and siesta time was a daily event. They were – then – generally well off, although the phosphate royalties by no means trickled down to all Nauruan families and there was – even then – resentment that Europeans had taken a lot from the island prior to Independence – and since, unfortunately. By the time I left, hostility toward expatriates was growing increasingly manifest. They were, in some cases quite justifiably, the scapegoats. The fact that among the Nauruan youth were some extremely competent future leaders who were not being catered for, just didn’t seem to hit home. “It doesn’t matter” was the expats’ catchcall.

I left in 1981, a wiser chap. I learned from mates still there into 1982 and beyond some grotesque stories about the Principal’s car being burnt out and more two-day notices and so on. I wondered for a while if the English Department still had peeling walls and if they had new holes in them … But then Nauru receded in my mind as I strove to do other things and I had a whole raft of other experiences in other places.

First published in the PPTA Journal, Term 3, 1983, pp. 30-33.