Landfall 232 : Aotearoa New Zealand Arts and Letters, Autumn 2016 9780947522452, 9781927322246

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November 2016 Editor David Eggleton Founding Editor Charles Brasch (1909–1973) Cover: Elizabeth Thomson, Sentient, 2015, 1400 x 2020 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel. Above: James Robinson, untitled drawing from Anthropocene and Asylum series, 2015, 700 x 500 mm. Mixed media on paper. Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand.

OTA G O U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

CONTENTS

4 6 15 16 17 26 28 35 36 43 46 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 64 73 76 78 80 83 85 94 95 96 105 106 107

Landfall Essay Competition 2016 Judge’s Report, David Eggleton Umlaut, Airini Beautrais A Fugitive Presence, Peter Bland By Sky, Alice Miller Writing out of Place: The Terrorist, the Cold House and the Baby, Michalia Arathimos one-lane bridge, Tony Beyer Round Here, Carolyn Cossey Radio Voice, Sam Clements Origin of  ‘A Vale Undelivered’, Michael Steven Remembering Harry Russell Haley, Jan Kemp Te Horotiu, October 1972, M.D. Rann Sun Strike, Nicholas Reid Pity the Composer, Nick Ascroft Sensibilities, Chris Tse she has days when she’s back, Kerrin P. Sharpe The Filipina Maid Makes the Bed, Elizabeth Smither The Rosin Box, Elizabeth Smither Trains, Ruth Arnison Hide and Seekers, Claire Orchard Lucy, Caoimhe McKeogh ART PORTFOLIO, Nick Austin The Lynch Mob, Heidi North-Bailey Ballad of the Pink Roids, Jenny Powell Dressing the Dead, Robynanne Milford From Casting Off, a forthcoming memoir, Elspeth Sandys Neilson Street, Michael Steven Rata Terrace, John Summers Stable, Sue Wootton Port Bowen, Airini Beautrais ART PORTFOLIO, Elizabeth Thomson Wood Tiger Meets Fire Dog, Therese Lloyd Scream, Maris O’Rourke Homage to Tongan Poets, Scott Hamilton 2

Wanting for Nothing, Jessica Le Bas The Only Fish, Victoria Broome Small Blue Pill, Olivia Macassey New Year Ekiden, Brent Kininmont Learning Geography One Disaster at a Time, Elizabeth Morton Work, Michael Morrissey Abraham and Isaac, Ben Egerton Stepfather No. 2, Leilani Tamu T-ball Wars, Ria Masae Holes, Kirsten McDougall Appreciated, Rebecca Reader Match Day Clowns, David Coventry Exit Glacier, Karen Zelas The Pāua Sisters, Jennifer Compton Liking the Local: A reading of Charles Brasch’s poem ‘The Clear’, Lynn Jenner 152 The Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2016 Judge’s Report, Vincent O’Sullivan 109 112 113 114 115 116 122 123 124 126 133 135 141 143 147

T HE LANDFALL REVIEW

158 Landfall Review Online: Books recently reviewed 159 Lawrence Jones on Bloomsbury South: The arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 by Peter Simpson 166 Vaughan Rapatahana on Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley 170 Michael Morrissey on The Antipodeans by Greg McGee 173 Christopher Ward-Greene on Love as a Stranger by Owen Marshall 176 James Norcliffe on Beside Herself by Chris Price; and Fits and Starts by Andrew Johnston 180 Sally Blundell on A History of New Zealand Women by Barbara Brookes 185 Edmund Bohan on Outcasts of the Gods by Hazel Petrie; and Ka Ngaro Te Reo by Paul Moon 189 David Herkt on Lost and Gone Away by Lynn Jenner 202 Contributors 208 LANDFALL BACK PAGE Simon Kaan

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DAVID EGGLETON

LANDFALL ESSAY COMPETITION 2016 JUDGE’S REPORT The best essays are not an escapist form of writing, nor are they slab-like factual articles; rather, they engage with the world directly and are driven by personal passions. Theodor Adorno stated that ‘the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy’: its purpose is to challenge us with literary evidence of a free mind in play. I was looking, then, for the unexpected. Good essays declare themselves by exceeding the expectations of the casual but alert reader; they serve as a means of consciousness-raising, as a form of enlightenment. There were 51 entries submitted for the 2016 Landfall Essay Competition on a wide range of subjects, but actually falling into a small number of thematic groupings. The major group consisted of essays on ‘home’, or on autobiographical memory and the sense of place; then there were topical essays on assorted cultural matters of the moment, as indicated by an essay provocatively titled ‘Why C.K. Stead is the Mike Hosking of literary criticism’ (much less revelatory than that title promised). A third group of essays outlined paradoxes of identity in an age of hybridities and quests for essentialism, and a smaller fourth group were miscellaneous essays on subjects ranging from staging Shakespeare, to the influence of the Gothic on New Zealand culture, to an account of the murder of the missionary Carl Völkner. The winning essay, ‘Umlaut’ by Airini Beautrais, stood out as written by someone unwilling to be boring, willing to take risks, and enough of a seasoned practitioner to carry it off with sustained verve. ‘Umlaut’ is dextrous, exuberant and comical, if sardonic. It’s an account of the vexing business of unusual names and the thorny encounters they can provoke in this country with bureaucracy, with the insular-minded, with the proudly ignorant. It’s about the absurdities of modern life: how we negotiate otherness, how we negotiate our constantly revised colonial heritage on a daily basis. Sometimes verging on slapstick, nevertheless it’s a tour de force of a kind. 4

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The runner-up, ‘Writing out of Place: The Terrorist, the Cold House and the Baby’, by Michalia Arathimos, is about what happens when your notion of ‘home’ is violently turned upside down by the punitive apparatus of the authoritarian state, acting on mistaken assumptions. It offers eloquent, anguished testimony of personal experience of the current grand narrative of ‘the war on terror’ encircling the globe, through being caught up in the fallout from the 2007 Urewera ‘anti-terrorist’ raids. The third-placed essay, ‘Round Here’, by Carolyn Cossey, is bitter-sweet: an understated, lucid, ironic and fully achieved exercise in remembering growing up in a rural area, rich with family associations, on the outskirts of Auckland and now being subdivided. These three essays are published here, along with the elegiac essay by Michael Steven, ‘Origin of a Vale Undelivered’, an examination of the circumstances surrounding the death of the artist Ben Webb.

NEW ESSAY COMPETITION FOR YOUNGER WRITERS Landfall is delighted to announce a brand-new essay competition for younger writers, aged 16–21. Entries open on 1 December, and the results of the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition will be announced in the May issue of Landfall each year, while the Landfall Essay Competition will continue as before, with results announced in the November issue. Please see page 196 for entry information for the new competition or visit www.otago.ac.nz/press

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AIRINI BEAUTRAIS

Umlaut My children’s father was the first person I ever dated. By this I mean that until we met, I had done what I presume most of my peers did: got drunk or stoned and got into bed. I had never gone to a movie beforehand, or planned a picnic, or gone out for coffee. There was something antique about sitting there in the pub in the five o’clock sunlight, potted palms drooping around us, plastic jug being evenly poured into two smeary glasses. This person wanted us to get to know each other. It was quiet in there. It had the feeling of an empty theatre. In the daylight the red velvet drapes looked dusty and sad. The wooden floors looked like welltrodden wooden floors. Things would transform into other things when night fell. At the time, that particular pub was where the hipsters went, and after the hipsters the sort-of-hipsters, and after a certain hour the generic, severely drunk drunks who went wherever they saw crowds. You’d get sticky legs from the constant slosh of beer; there’d be unsolicited frotting. The owner had the unfortunate task of stopping the band at midnight so the neighbours, who’d bought apartments in the middle of the city’s small zone of nightlife, would not force the pub to close permanently. He’d stand on stage reasoning into the microphone while intoxicated groupies yelled, ‘Play another one!’, oblivious to his pleas. The final closure was effected a few years later. I did not particularly want to get to know anyone at the time. I had come out of a badly executed relationship, and wanted a lover, or several, who would hardly talk to me. I didn’t feel ready to meet my children’s father. We made small talk. He told me about the autobahns back home. ‘Sometimes when my brother is driving I look over and see he’s going at 200ks. But you don’t notice it, it just feels normal.’ And then I thought it would be proper to find out, like I hadn’t, always. ‘What’s your last name?’ I asked him. He smiled at me, said, ‘Wait for it …’ drummed on the table, clicked his fingers, pointed into the air and announced, ‘Grübsch!’ 6

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‘What?’ ‘Grübsch.’ ‘How do you spell that?’ That was the difficult question. * When a letter arrives for Mr Grubsch, I am disheartened. Something is missing; something small but vital. A grub is a juvenile insect. Or a filthy person. When my partner was doing relief teaching he used to tell the kids his name was Mr Norman, because it was easier. When he relieved for a German teacher, he allowed himself to be Mr Grübsch. ‘Sir,’ a boy asked him once, ‘why do you have a smiley face in your name?’ Ü. When you handwrite it on a whiteboard, it’s two dots for eyes and a quick bendy mouth. It makes a sound like the ‘oo’ in ‘food’. Take away the dots and it sounds like the ‘u’ in ‘pudding’. But the ‘u’ in pudding isn’t the same as the ‘u’ in ‘grubs’. Food. Pudding. Grubs. If I were Norman I’d wish for a dollar for every time I’d been Grubs. The English language has some weird mongrel vowels, and that’s fascinating, like a tapestry, or a painting with many layers of paint. Bird, person, work, lurk: same vowel sounds, different vowels. Deutsch doesn’t do this. As much of a pain in the arse as it is learning German, as much as genitives and datives and gendered nouns can tie a native English speaker’s brain into knots, at least the language is phonetic. Learn the sounds the letters make and you’ll be able to read a word and pronounce it correctly. One of our German lecturer friends told me the hardest word for a learner to master is ‘Eichhörnchen’. Eiche: an oak tree. Eichhörnchen: a squirrel. An Eichel is an acorn, or the head of a penis. This quietly alters the experience of walking in parks in the autumn. It was a man named Griebsch who suggested to Norman what his name might mean. He lived on the floor below; the names sat on nearby intercom buttons. A Grübsch is probably the same thing as a Griebsch: the core of a fruit. Gräbsch is another variant. Apfelgriebsch. My children are not grubs. They are the core of an apple. Like Johnny Appleseed, blessed by nomenclature with some divine botanical purpose. Griebsch, Gräbsch, Grübsch: all these are regional names. It’s hard to know where Herr Müller might be from. But Herr Grübsch will, at least at some point, have ties to a small triangle of villages just north of the city of Leipzig. Oma and Opa Grübsch live in a house built by a Grübsch 7

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and inhabited by Grübsches for five or six generations. When you walk down to the local Konsum you might see a Grübsch cycling past. A distant cousin who barely recognises you. You’ll pass a number of Grübsch letterboxes. Some you’ll know, some you won’t. Drive for half an hour and you won’t find any. * The answer to my question, in the dusty red velvet evening in the pub, was that there are two spellings. One is that you put an umlaut—those two little dots— over the u. The other is that you write an e after the u. So ü and ue are phonetically the same, while ü and u are not. Food, food. Food, pudding. An umlaut is written the same as a diaeresis, but doesn’t have the same effect. Similar diacritical marks are found in a range of languages, with a range of different purposes. ‘Umlaut’ is the name for the symbol as used in Germanic languages, where it indicates that a vowel sounds as though it is followed by an e. Perhaps it originated in Middle High German at a time when writing the letter e felt like too much of an effort. Fortunately for this barely lubricated conversation, I knew what an umlaut was. This is because one generation back, there’s one in my family. This umlaut arrived in New Zealand on a boat in around 1900, worked in quarries, had a daughter (whose married name, appropriately, is Stoney) and four sons. Like Norman’s surname, it’s regional. In the Swiss village of Küssnacht you can walk past any number of doors labelled ‘Gössi’. In the local town hall there are family records dating back to the sixteenth century. These are meticulously kept: in the 1980s the authorities were disgruntled with my mother for not writing and notifying them that she’d got married and had three children. Perhaps, unconsciously, it was this sort of common ground: the sharing of a diacritic, like finding you’ve been told the same folktales, that helped Norman and me connect with each other. Perhaps it was similar when my parents met, and without even discussing it fell into some kind of groove cut by the shared pain of being constantly, sometimes wilfully, mispronounced. Gössi, like Grübsch, loses its diacritic in an Anglo spelling environment. Typing the ö is a nuisance. Was this even possible on a typewriter? So the little e which in the olden days had been written above the a, o or u, and which morphed over time into the two dots, was re-inserted. Goessi. ‘Goosey! Go-Easy Rider!’ the kids at school used to taunt my mum and her sisters, over and over. By the time she married my dad, Mum hated her name so much she would have changed it to 8

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just about anything. Beautrais was acceptable, despite being similarly ‘foreign’. All the things we’ve been called over the years, all the names on envelopes: Beauchamp, Beetroot, Beatrice—even, once, Beautyanus—what the fuck did it matter? She was no longer Easy Rider, or a goose. * What is different for a person in an Anglo-dominated culture with a nonAnglo name? What makes it different for children growing up? You look different, I’ve been told. You sound different. Where are you from? How long has your family lived here? Do you speak French? Your ancestors must have settled in Akaroa? Do I? Do I? I was born in Auckland. Between four and six generations. No, I never learned. No, my French ancestor came by himself and went to Taumarunui. ‘You had better ring the schools when you apply for jobs,’ said my teachers’ college lecturer, ‘so they know you can speak English.’ As a Pākehā, though, I can still slip quietly into the coat pockets of white privilege. I do not have to deal with the everyday systematic racism that a non-white New Zealander faces. It’s only a name, after all. But my experience, my family’s experience, my partner’s experience with names is like a little hole in the seam of that coat pocket, shedding a small light on the fabric of cultural superiority. A kiwi is a bird, or a hairy fruit, or a person who identifies as a New Zealander. In the latter instance, that is the surface meaning. On another level, a Kiwi is a white New Zealander of British extraction. This was the silent suggestion in Don Brash’s election campaign billboards, half blue half red, labelled Iwi/Kiwi. This was implied in Paul Henry’s buffoonish jokes about Anand Satyanand. In every comment about what is or isn’t Kiwi. There are degrees of Kiwi. Some of us are more Kiwi than others. Never mind the goddamn bird being just about extinct. Or the Psa bacterium. The T-sauce, the pav, the black singlet, the jandals, the All Blacks, the hokey pokey, the red and black Swanddri, the quarter-acre section. Does this apply to anyone? What does it all add up to? To me it’s like a weird imperative to throw oneself in that problematic melting pot, the moulding of a shape into which people can be pressed and tested, and fit or not. You are welcome. You aren’t. The poll tax. The dawn raids. Our pathetic refugee quota. There’s a series of kids’ books currently in production called Kiwi Corkers, full of faltering anapaestic lines, improbable dated slang, fudged rhymes, mangled reo. The 9

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Gebrüder Grimm meets Footrot Flats, no irony intended. Cinderella marries a footy player. The little red hen is a little blue duck. She milks cows by hand and owns an Edmonds cookbook. That’s what ‘Kiwi’ means to me—an odd kind of half-arsed point-missing fairytale. One that’s increasingly difficult to maintain as populations become more urbanised and more multicultural, but don’t we ever keep trying. * The first Gössi generation born in New Zealand were born in the 1930s. They became young adults in a time when anything Germanic was suspicious. German biscuits became Belgian biscuits, German shepherds Alsatians. There’s an old piano at my son’s Playcentre, walnut veneer, with a brass inlay reading ‘Made in’ and then a scratched-out shape that starts with a ‘G’ and ends with a ‘y’. There are photographs in our local museum of bricks through butcher shop windows. The longstanding mis-association of a regime with a people. Mr Norman, when his carefully practised accent cracked, when his country of origin was made known, was enthusiastically greeted with the Nazi salute. His Aussie friend listed him in his mobile contacts as ‘Hit’. When my grandfather started school in 1937, his English wasn’t fluent. By the time he left school he’d lost Schweizer-Deutsch. His parents spoke it to each other, and a mixture to their children, but somehow the children lost their grip on it, or it lost its grip on them. When we sift through old family letters, Norman has to translate. He gets excited and races ahead of us, photographs everything with his phone. What is he tapping into? What is he preserving? One of my granddad’s brothers trimmed his name, changing it by deedpoll to the more palatable Goss. No dots. No ‘e’. No diminutive ‘i’ as in Müsli, Röteli, Käselädeli. Another brother just rolled with the pronunciation his friends and acquaintances gave him, Gossey. ‘Who the fuck is Daniel Goessi?’ his son Darryl was heard to exclaim, when by some unlikely chance a caller hit upon the original vowel sound. It’s a little like the men named Rangi who ended up rhyming with ‘tangy’. Remove a person from family and culture, take down the struts of a language—by a Native Schools Act, by gardenvariety xenophobia, by sheer inconvenience—and a name is quickly unsettled. Sometimes it’s better just to go by an initial. But you can get a name back. Sometimes this means going home. Sometimes this means going to the other side of the world. My Aunt Jane 10

AIRINI BEAUTRAIS

waitressed in a small ski town in Switzerland. After years abroad she came back via Europe and Asia by motorbike, with a Swiss man named Hans. And an umlaut. Jane Gössi. Hans got dropped fairly quickly. The umlaut persisted, two black jewels in a little floating crown. Hans eked out a living in Helensville growing carnations and flicking on the odd bottle of contraband moonshine. He and Jane distilled a few batches together. ‘Jane make good Schnapps,’ Hans told me and Norman, as we sat at his kitchen table in Chur, many years later, sampling his friends’ Pflümli and Kirschwasser. It seemed like months, years, followed the evening in the hipster pub, where we would find ourselves shifting from table to table, raising our glasses. Sampling the regional spirits of the Western world. About three years on from that early pub date we found ourselves with a fat, spirited baby, going through the ropes of getting him two passports. If the umlaut had been fascinating to me before, it now became something of a furious obsession. * The difficulty in keeping an umlaut is a symptom of the difficulty in keeping a language. Besides Schweizer-Deutsch, my ancestors lost two further languages in New Zealand: French and Gaelic. What do we have left of those languages? A surname. A gravestone. A one franc piece. Two recipes for biscuits, a recipe for rösti. (Without the umlaut, they’re ‘roasty’.) A small museum. Some dubious tartans. Is that really all? Where did the rest go? Time after time, Norman would have the same conversation with my grandfather. You spoke German as a child? So why can’t you speak it now? Before our children were born we were so sure times had changed. Before our children were born we were sure they’d be one hundred per cent bilingual. We hadn’t taken into account the hidden weight, in a family where a mother is the primary parent, of the term ‘mother-tongue’. In the womb the children heard me calling biological facts across a lino’d lab. Out of it, they heard my half-remembered lullabies, my English baby nonsense. German came home from work in the evening, sometimes not until very late. It was a paternal T-shirt tucked into a bassinet, a wide rising chest to fall asleep against in the wee small hours. German was on Skype, on a plane ride, on holiday. It told them to stand up, to put on their jackets, to brush their teeth. Nowadays they speak to their father in a mongrel mixture. Sometimes this is funny. Sometimes it’s infuriating. They’ll pick it up quickly if they ever live 11

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there, we tell each other. Sometimes it feels like standing next to a swimming pool pipetting in a tiny drop of something other than water. A drop of Pflümli. What are the chances? The New Zealand passport office did not appear keen for anyone to leave the country, even if only for a few weeks’ holiday in Australia. This photograph has a shadow under the chin. The baby’s lips are slightly parted. Then there were my fuck-ups: the writing on the back of the photograph does not match the witness’s handwriting. The parent has forgotten to sign the form. Back and forth went the documentation, with time running short, and the ex-pat parent, stressed by travel in general, becoming increasingly panicked. Then came the call explaining that the passport was now held up because ‘the name on the passport does not match the name on the birth certificate’. You may not have a umlaut in a New Zealand passport. In fact, you may not have any diacritic. You may not have an acute, a grave, a breve, a cedilla. You may not have an ogonek or a háček. You may not have a circumflex, or a macron. A macron. One of our official languages, the indigenous language of Aotearoa, is, in its written form, full of macrons. And you may not have a macron. Some friends of ours found this out when an envelope arrived from the passport office addressed to their daughter, Hoeng?rangi. The start of her association with the state, they joked. The state, that great big bottle of homogenised milk. That Kiwi Corker bureaucracy. Have a beaut day. The solution to not being allowed an umlaut, was, of course, to insert an e. No, said the passport office; then the name will not be the same as it is on the birth certificate (where it was spelled with a ü). Master Lukas Grübsch would just have to lose his dots and be Grubsch. But that’s WRONG, I argued. What was I supposed to do? I would have to find some way of proving that there were two ways of spelling the name, I was told. After a period of intense rage, I rang the German embassy. They answered, of course, in German. I did what I always do when faced with brisk, official High German—said ‘Guten tag,’ and then fell back on English, blabbling my story. I am not German—but my partner is German—my son was born here— but he is also a German citizen—we have this problem with the New Zealand passports office—about an umlaut—what do I do? 12

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The man at the embassy, in the kind of clear, impeccable English used only by second-language speakers, and maybe the Queen at Christmas, said: ‘You will need to bring in your partner’s passport which will show both spellings, as proof. Along the bottom of the passport on the first page it will show the international spelling.’ Whew. I did not need to write to the local council in Schkeuditz. I did not need to compile a family history going back a thousand years. I did not need to write an essay on the umlaut. So my son got to be Grübsch on his birth certificate, and in his Playcentre profile book, and on his school uniform and lunchbox and socks, and Gruebsch on his passport and at the doctor’s and anywhere where an ‘ü’ on a hand-filled form might be swapped for an ‘u’ on a computer file. It would all work out somehow. But slowly, imperceptibly, as years went by, I was getting madder. I was no longer mildly annoyed about speaking to an audience to whom I’d been introduced as Aarony Bewtriss. I no longer let people spell my first name ‘Irene’ if they felt like it. I would carefully sound out ‘Kroopsch. Kroopsch.’ The ‘g’ is more like a ‘k’. The ‘b’ is more like a ‘p’. There’s a ‘sch’ at the end. Like in school, but it’s not ‘sk’, it’s more like ‘shh’. It is not funny. It is not unusual. It is my family’s name. It is no more different than Smith. One of you is an apple core. The other makes horseshoes. Both those things are equally irrelevant. And in turn I got madder every time I heard someone else’s name botched. And every time I heard someone say dumb shit about immigrants. And every time a redneck wrote to the local paper and said we had a referendum on this, and said it isn’t pronounced with an h anyway, and said I am a white guy who knows better and Wanganui has always been spelled this way. It’s always been this way. Recently, in the doctor’s surgery, a nurse walked into the waiting room and said my name correctly. A warmth swelled up in me that made me want to burst into tears. Ever so occasionally, this happens. I get a call centre operator who gets it. Or someone says, ‘That was my grandmother’s name.’ Or ‘My daughter is having a baby, I suggested that name.’ As I sat down and prepared to explain to the nurse that I was pissing blood, she asked me, ‘Did I say your name right?’ I affirmed. She said, ‘Oh, that’s just how you would say it in my language, Shona—from Zimbabwe.’ I said my name is Māori and that perhaps the vowels and the rolled ‘r’ are the same in both those languages. 13

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Despite my physical discomfort, I was beginning to feel soothed. I am a Pākehā with a Māori first name. I was named after Airini Gössi, the quarry labourer’s daughter who married a Stoney. To her Swiss parents, the name didn’t seem difficult. Not all dipthongs are pronounced the same in Māori and German, but ‘Ai’ is. I have a French surname, brought out on a boat by a man of no history. It doesn’t mean shoemaker. It doesn’t mean apple core. It doesn’t appear to mean anything. People said he’d been a fugitive criminal and had made it up, until the internet took off and we realised there were more of us. There are ten people called Beautrais in New Zealand, and the rest are in Nantes. My s might be silent but no one is going to take it off me. Spelling and pronouncing a name correctly is a matter of respect. It is a way of saying I give enough of a shit about you to honour who you are. It is a matter of listening carefully to vowel and consonantal sounds, and how they differ to those of one’s primary language. It is okay to ask. It is okay to make a mistake. And it is okay to be corrected. ‘Whanganui’ does not rhyme with ‘conger’ and ‘Dewey’. Whanganui iwi would like an ‘h’ in the place name given by their ancestors. There’s no valid argument against this. It is their name and their language. It is about acknowledging colonisation, admitting to privilege, and saying we do not have to keep on walking that worn-out path. We can take that coat off and set fire to it. And what is the umlaut about? It is two dots, a diacritic, which turn the letter u into a smiley face. But I hope the umlaut, for my kids, is about saying I am tauiwi. I am Pākehā, but I am only a little bit British. I was born here, and I have come here from somewhere else. I have brought a few treasures with me. A coin. A tea-box. These small dots. Some of my waka were sailing ships. They had names like Jocelyn, Margaret, Gertrude, Spray, Baron Aberdare. Some of my waka were steamships. One, my papa’s waka, was a waka rererangi, a Boeing 747 that hit the tarmac in 2005. I know where I am from. I know whose land I live on. I am keeping my diacritic. I will help you keep yours. I will say bird names, tree names, place names as the first people gave them. I carry all this with me at home, and at my other homes, and when I pass ports.

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PETER BLAND

A Fugitive Presence You don’t know me and I don’t know you but there are doors best left open, borders to cross, and an imperceptible molecular sharing you’d probably feel should our lives ever touch. At the very heart of our common sorrows, in the unknown depths of every tear we let drop, mermaids are singing and great fleets sail past.

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ALICE MILLER

By Sky At the edge of this cool lake, alps risen by sky I ask you to let us unrumple, unstain, lift this thing—a woman—from your stone up. I ask you to read from the old books. I will paint her colourless lips a shade not blood, I will carry her body by the road. I will drive us into another world. By then I will know how.

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MICHALIA ARATHIMOS

Writing out of Place: The Terrorist, the Cold House and the Baby Hold tight, wait till the party’s over. Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather. There has got to be a way. Burning down the house. —Talking Heads, ‘Burning Down the House’ I had a dream last night that filled me with dismay. In it a person I had known for a long time had transitioned to another gender. I stuttered over their new pronoun as I spoke, while they smiled tolerantly down at me. I awoke feeling oddly reprimanded by my own subconscious, wanting with every part of myself to apologise, to excuse, to explain. Such are the feelings we have when we think about privilege and its function, and it is easy to understand why we don’t want to engage. I would rather think about poetry, for example. Let us think about poetry! Let us immerse ourselves in fiction! Leave the politics out of it, and let us step into the magic of the written word! But poetry does not exist outside of politics. Prose does not exist outside of politics. Nothing does. My past few years have been a rollercoaster of shifting cultural locales. Some of these locales were conducive to writing poetry and fiction. Some of them made me realise how lucky I was to have grown up in Aotearoa. And some of them were threatening to my physical and mental health. I have come to conceptualise Aotearoa as a series of fortified or embattled spaces, some interlinked, some overlapping, and some exclusive to the extreme. One room I have inhabited is the office of the white PhD student, a place where one is able to spend time writing essays. There is a beautiful view here, and it smells of good coffee. Another space I am acquainted with is that which encloses a pregnant woman whose partner is on trial, who is facing a possible future of gaol visits, forced single parenthood, and poverty. This space is temporal and constrictive. It smells of damp houses and laundry 17

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powder, and is made up partly of my own body. The house I grew up in was that of the migrant, of the exile: a house in which you speak one language at home and another outside it. This space is bordered by gardens and there is an olive tree out back. In one of my new rooms now I am the mother of Māori children who, statistically speaking, face greater challenges than their Pākehā peers. Another recent space I inhabited was a children’s library in remote indigenous Australia. My son’s cheeks seem very pale here, and his clothes clean and new. He has a significantly longer life expectancy than his peers because of who his parents happen to be. In this space my privilege is an embarrassing cloak that I wish to lay down or burn. But there is no burning privilege. Is there? In 2004 Tze Ming Mok wrote, ‘The day will come when I won’t be a minority in this country. No one will be.’ The future she wrote of, that of increasing hybridity and pluralism, is at hand, but is Aotearoa quite keeping up? Our most immediate mirror of our selves, our media, reflects a plethora of conflicting New Zealand selves: some anxious to responsibly represent Māori; some enthralled at the idea of including other, exotic selves in the national self; some anxious about ‘those Chinese stealing all our houses’; some interested in making space for refugees; some desperate to keep those same refugees out. We have a kind of myth in our popular culture that we as a nation are tolerant, and welcoming, and postcolonial, and happily bicultural. How true is this? Homi K. Bhabha wrote of a Third Space, a space in which each person is a unique collection of their set of identity factors. Lynette Russell, a descendant of the Wotjabaluk people of Australia, says that for her, as for myself, ‘Bhabha’s Third Space is … much more than a theoretical posturing, it is a lived in experiential locale.’ As an educated woman who passes for white in Aotearoa, until a few years ago I had more or less been located in relation to power in a space that was comparatively safe. Then my partner was arrested for terrorism in 2007, and the boundaries of my reality shifted and changed. If whiteness can be described as a place, we spent five years positioned outside of it. If privilege is a cloak, I was stripped of it. If it is an island, we were cast offshore. I have inhabited many houses and I have worn many cloaks. I am familiar 18

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with the feel of the cloak of a writer reading to a quiet audience, on a cold night, while the audience drinks wine. I am familiar with the cloak I wore to my Māori partner’s trial: an interlocking armour of conservative clothes designed to make the defendants look more respectable to a Pākehā judge. I am familiar with the cloak of my own skin as I gave birth to my children, covered in sweat or water, naked, subject to the forces of the universe, which might grant me a healthy child or not, and which, ultimately, rendered me cloakless. If privilege is a structure it is like a ladder, with landings holding various costumes to put on along the way. I have moved up and down it. Some of us are empowered to step up or down the rungs more easily than others. If privilege is a village it is a series of houses lined up on the hill, with the people at the bottom living in cars and warming their hands around a rubbish bin fire, and those at the top living in mansions and owning private jets. Now that I’ve earned my PhD, now that my partner is not on trial, now that I am not on the borderline of poverty, I may walk from house to house, visiting words upon them and picking at the locks. Bhabha’s space is created partly by language, transcending and including the linguistic, the physical and the cultural. If I have existed in this radically shifting space, as I have done, then surely I might explode it. Perhaps we may do more than apologise, describe, dissect, explain. If privilege is a series of houses that I can see and write about, then perhaps we may burn the houses down. When my partner was arrested for terrorism in 2007 we had been together for three months. I had known him very well for years, and we were in that first phase of love where a too-long absence can flip easily into feelings of loss. Before the arrests I was an educated woman with interesting work, no dependants and absolute freedom. Next thing I knew, we were expecting our first child five months after the final trial date. After the trial, in which my partner’s charges were dropped, we lived in a cold house whose foundations were rotting but that the landlord said were too expensive to fix. The baby had cold after cold, and we spent all our money on electricity bills. I was doing a PhD in Creative Writing, at least in theory. The truth was that I was so concerned with the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that I had no energy for indulging in the top. Adequate heat, food, housing: these were our concern. The safety of my loved ones: that was my concern too. I had 19

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always told people that I needed to write. It’s true that I ‘need’ to write. But in those months after the baby was born and my partner was about to be either convicted or set free, I found out that I needed to have a warm house to keep my baby well. I needed to be allowed to earn enough to pay the bills, which we should have been able to do. I needed the security of knowing my partner wasn’t going to be sent to gaol. Having written from that place, and writing from the place I inhabit now, I am telling you: I am a hundred times more likely to be able to write with my current view. The space I occupy right now, with my new, warm, not constantly sick second baby asleep in the other room, in our insulated rental house as my partner works full time to pay for someone else’s retirement, is more conducive to writing than others I have occupied. The space where my partner was potentially one of the overwhelmingly brown prison population, and where I experienced panic attacks and anxiety as a result of the surveillance and the stress, was not so conducive. I have passed as Pākehā in this country, and then I have dwelled in the spaces occupied by non-Pākehā, where the police are not your friend. I have been present in a courtroom where the colour scheme is an unpleasant ombre: brown for the supporters of the defendants in the Urewera 17, graduating to a whiter hue with the court clerk’s table, till we reach the white court reporters and the mostly white lawyers and the inevitably white judge at the front. It is possible, of course, to write from both spaces. But it is a lot more likely that I would be empowered to write from this space I inhabit now, now that I am not queuing for the food bank, and my partner is not in gaol. Because I have lived this way I am aware of how many people have it worse than I did, right now, in Aotearoa. I am aware of all those various pearls on the necklace: all equally valuable, some denigrated and systemically abused, and others arbitrarily held up to the light. This essay is about overlapping contexts, so how about this for a context. I will describe a familiar New Zealand to you, one you know and love. See if you recognise it. I grew up in the 1980s, a time of great optimism and social change, though I didn’t know it then. I did know, because of the exuberant political discourse of the times, that girls could do anything, that New Zealand was clean and green and nuclear free, that counting to four went ‘tahi, rua, toru, wha’, and that some bad people had bombed the Rainbow Warrior. I knew that we were 20

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lucky to live in New Zealand. I knew that my parents had marched against something called the Springbok Tour, and that my father would not buy African violets. I knew that recycling was good, and that it was going to save the world. There was violence and poverty and oppression then, especially then, which was why everyone was marching and doing something about it. But this air of optimistic change and hope pervaded my childhood and carried on somehow through the disaffected nineties. By the time I was at university at the end of that decade we had entered a new era: that of the student loan and rising university fees. But we protested, we marched and we yelled about it, and this did not seem to be a fringe activity, one that warranted surveillance and police action, but something acceptable or even expected. I took it for granted that I was surrounded by environmental and social justice activists. I believed we were safe to voice dissent. Scroll forwards a few years, and I had started a relationship with my current partner. There were photographs of him in the paper climbing out a window of an occupied building during Wellington’s anti-motorway bypass protests. He had spent time on the West Coast of the South Island, where he had tried to save the native snail. He was once arrested at a Native Forest Action protest while dressed as a giant chicken. His activism always seemed benign, as acceptable as my own. On 15 October 2007, I was in my office at Massey University in Wellington when I received a telephone call. In retrospect I understand something of what happened for me personally that day. It is not often that you can pinpoint a moment in the path of a life where everything changed. It may happen a few times: with a death or a birth, or with an unexpected event. For me that phone call marked a moment of no return, where everything you thought you knew of a place is turned on its head. I didn’t know it then, but my New Zealand was broken. I had finished teaching an English language class. I still don’t know how the activist who called got hold of my office number. ‘Your partner’s being held down at the police station,’ she said. ‘They’re taking them to court.’ She left ellipses after everything she said, as though I might infer something important. Who were they? I asked. Why were they being held? How many of them 21

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were there? What was all this about? ‘There are many others,’ she said. ‘It’s best not to discuss it on the phone.’ Now I left an ellipsis. ‘You haven’t seen the news?’ she asked. She didn’t say the word terrorism, not then. She may not have heard it yet. ‘You need to leave work and come down to the courthouse,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty bad.’ Whatever was in her voice was enough to convince me. I wrangled my way out of work. I grabbed my bag and left. I think I remember running. I certainly remember the weird, slick fear that started up in my chest, the intimation of something horrible and unwieldy that was beginning to happen quite outside of my control. Here are some facts about the raids that might refresh your memory. On the morning of 15 October 2007 some 300 police raided many communities around New Zealand with the object of uncovering some kind of terrorist cell. They arrested 17 people, who came to be known as the ‘Urewera 17’. They were to be the first defendants tried under the Terrorism Suppression Act, but on 8 November of that year the solicitor-general declined to press charges under that legislation. Three days after my partner was arrested, Helen Clark, then prime minister of New Zealand, referred to napalm bombs and terrorist camps in a media statement about the Urewera 17, effectively prejudicing people against them. Some other facts that are relevant but which may have been lost in the noise: the Special Tactics Group, which helped carry out the raids, was made a full-time operational unit of the New Zealand police in 2002, following the September 11 attacks in the US. The Terrorism Suppression Act was drafted in response to the September 11 attacks in the US. If there is any doubt that the arrests and raids in 2007 were in part a consequence of New Zealand’s need to take sides in an international discourse about terrorism, the week following the arrests the defendants’ names were added to an international database of terror suspects, the administrative base of which was in the US. As my partner’s name will not be removed from the file, we will never travel together in or through the US. Those are the facts, but here is what you really want to know: What were they really doing up there in the forest? 22

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They were training in traditional Māori bush lore, and they were learning tikanga Māori, and there was some radical thinking going on. But the difference between the defendants’ actions and words and those of, for example, a group of people planning an armed protest during the Springbok Tour, is negligible as far as I can tell. The difference is purely contextual. I won’t insult the reader by interrogating the blanket use of the term ‘terrorist’ in current international political discourse. I’m sure you can do that for yourself. When I think of those first days after the arrests, certain details emerge. The details seem random but play over and over in my head, and together they show at least the texture of my experience of that time, a particular patina. Some of these details are as follows. The week my partner was arrested, his lawyer told me he might get twenty years in gaol. She said the defendants were essentially guinea pigs for the new legislation. I learned that all of our text messages and phone conversations had been recorded—every communication, all through that first sensitive flush of love and desire. I learned that at 128 Abel Smith Street, a house raided in Wellington, the police seized a box of avocados, presumably thinking they might be grenades. I learned that an activist held at this place used some of his time to make apple crumble, while the police looked on. Rangi Kemara, one of the accused, told me that when he was raided he saw real fear in the eyes of the young policemen. They were shaking, he said. Whatever they had been told the defendants were up to had made them shake with adrenalin and fear. When I spoke to my father about the raids, the first thing he said was, ‘They’ve come for Tame Iti. They’ve been after him for years.’ I had no idea who he was talking about. I learned that they were thinking of sending my partner and the defendants to Guantanamo Bay. In the predominantly Pākehā suburb of Mt Victoria, at my partner’s house, the raids were a relatively subdued affair. He and his flatmates were woken at 6am by armed police, who proceeded to hold them for close to ten hours, searching their property and ripping apart the chairs in the living room and going through his female flatmates’ underwear drawers. But my partner was able to receive the police with comparative calm; they didn’t break through his ranchslider window, like they did at Tame Iti’s house. And when my partner suggested he make them all a cup of tea, the officers let him do it. 23

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This is in stark contrast to other details I would soon learn. And these are the details that really stay with me: not the anxiety or the fear or the sensation you get when you are followed by plain-clothes police, but the injustices. Here are the sharpest details, emerging through the murk like the tips of swords. In Rūātoki, they locked down the whole community. In Rūātoki, they made the people lie down on the confiscation line, where in 1866 Tūhoe lost the majority of their lands to the Crown. In Rūātoki, a ten-year-old girl was pepper-sprayed by the police. In Rūātoki, a 15-year-old girl was made to lie on the ground at gunpoint while crying and calling for help. She was intimately body-searched. The treatment of Tūhoe at the hands of police has now been ruled a violation by the Human Rights Commission, and the government has apologised. But what are the limitations of such an apology? Somewhere there is a community whose houses were shot up by the police. There is a young Māori woman whose memory holds this moment: the ground under her body as she is forced to lie down, the tears on her face, the way the police wouldn’t listen when she cried for them to stop. I would argue that no amount of counselling could erase that knowledge, no governmental apology. Nothing could erase the way she must have felt upon learning that the predominantly Pākehā children of Mt Victoria and Te Aro in Wellington had continued unsullied on their way to school. My New Zealand was broken. The important thing to note here is that it has always been broken. What happened to the group of people labelled ‘terrorists’ and their families and communities, as far as I can see, was a straightforward iteration of colonisation. And it showed me that we are not postcolonial at all. Tūhoe are a nation that were made to lie down on the line that separated them from an invading force. My parents marched against apartheid. Little did they know that in my lifetime my government would re-enact the original colonial wound upon its own people. Let us suppose for the purposes of this essay that time is non-linear, a series of moments or event locations hung together like a string of beads. Suppose then that everything happening in the history of Aotearoa was happening at once, not only time-wise but location-wise. Here is Captain Cook in 1769 sighting the coast of New Zealand for the first time. Here are my 24

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partner’s ancestors at Parihaka being seized and raped and killed and taken to be slaves in something called the Māori Wars. Here is the current prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, saying this land was settled peacefully. What does it mean that these moments exist in the same space? There is no good answer to this question. And I have been looking for an answer. Mok wrote optimistically in 2004 that the people were still open, that we as a society didn’t have to close ourselves off. In 2016, with a poverty gap larger than ever before and a mythical ‘middle New Zealand’ that has fallen through its own cracks and is looking for someone to blame, and an increasingly paranoid popular rhetoric of border policing, I’m not sure that that’s true. I appreciate the sentiment that we could all do with more tolerance and more love: in the end that is all we can strive for. But I have only one answer to offer. Burn the fucker down. And before the New Zealand police, who I believe probably still monitor our communications, get all literal in their interpretation of this, I mean all we can do is burn away whatever it is that is blinding us to what has happened to our country. Privilege is by definition a special advantage enjoyed over others, merely a function of the strata of our society. I want to burn away the lies and get to the strata underneath. I wish for tolerance, and of course I pine for love, a love that crosses ethnic barriers and gender divides and income demographics. But the most I can hope for is truth. For us to truly look at ourselves, and burn away any lie we may be continuing to tell that implies that Aotearoa is, at this moment, all right. To burn the lie that we are just, that we are clean and green, that this is an equal playing field, that we are postcolonial, or even that we all have decent places to live. What that burning might look like for the individual I can’t tell; maybe a stint once a week at a soup kitchen, or a different choice at the polls. All I know is that these islands that we live on, at our special edge of the universe, are foundering, are drowning, are going under. So burn, Aotearoa. Burn it down. Ake, Ake, Ake.

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one-lane bridge the last 5km to Marokopa sealed & windy through the hills the upper storeys of high-rise beehives leaning seawards off-road vehicle tracks intertwined on black sand out to the heads & fishing Anselm Kiefer’s Departure from Egypt mixed media & spinifex a decent surf break then soft wallow where tide & river meet the entire spot an elegy for someone who hasn’t died yet anywhere that empty feels like home but we’d determined on the Falls down their long damp shingle tunnel under bush then the spray in our faces requests for group photos in many languages the sound as much to be admired as white collapsing water yet where they’d clear-felled the trees embedded fences stepped rock & hawk country steeped in endemic loneliness 26

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nothing to rinse this isolation from the blood this national temperament

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Round Here When people ask me where the name Cossey is from, I deliberately misunderstand and tell them Drury. Growing up in this village just north of the Bombay Hills, just south of Papakura, Cosseys were plentiful. We collected our mail from the pigeonholes behind the counter at the post office, labelled A, B, C, Cossey, D and so forth. In my grandfather’s time, the Drury rugby club had sufficient Cosseys to form their own team. When I was eleven they had some sort of milestone jubilee, and the Cossey team’s photo was printed onto souvenir T-shirts. In those days the town was smaller than it is now. There was one block of shops, with the post office, a superette and a butcher. The Jolly Farmer pub was a little further up the road, and in between was the modest petrol station, with two pumps out the front and a workshop. The school had just one class in each year group. There was an ancient oak tree in the middle of the sports field that we were allowed to climb at lunchtime. There was also a trampoline, set on a concrete pad outside the block of classrooms. Each class was timetabled to use it at playtime and lunchtime: you could go by yourself for a two-minute turn, or with a partner and get four minutes. My father and his brother each had a half share of the farm my grandfather had inherited from his father. The farm was bisected by the North Island main-trunk railway line. My grandparents lived in the old farmhouse. Well into the 1980s it remained original, with electric power but no running water. The corrugated iron water tank at the back door had a brass tap from which my grandmother used to fill buckets of water. In the combined kitchen and dining room that formed the hub of the house there was a large square waterheating unit. Water for dishes and baths came from there. There was no sink; to do the dishes a flat red plastic basin was filled with hot water and made sudsy, then put on the bench that ran along one wall. The dishes were washed and stacked onto a tin drying tray. If you were on drying duty, you knew that the first cup washed was the ‘leaner’. Subsequent plates would be balanced 28

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on it to drain. Woe betide you if you forgot and took the leaner away. The toilet was in its own building outside. When we were small and stayed the night, there was a china potty under our beds. As we got older we were expected to brave the night terrors and go to the outhouse. Most of the living happened in the kitchen. The green-topped Formica table could seat four, if it was just a few of us for a quick game of cards, or it could be extended for family occasions. An imposing grandfather clock stood in one corner and announced the hour and half hour with Westminster chimes. My father was one of four siblings, all with children of their own, so if everyone was there the house was full. We’d fill up on pizza made with tinned spaghetti, and sausage rolls. My mother often made thin crepes, filled with jam and cream, or lemon and sugar. After lunch my cousins and I would spread outside among the garden and sheds, for ‘go home, stay home’. On the land over the railway tracks, where my parents’ house stood, the western boundary of the farm was marked by a creek. Narrow and overgrown where it flowed past our back paddocks, it eventually became part of Slippery Creek. It passed under the Great South Road, on a long, meandering journey to the Manukau Harbour. Sometimes we would have to cross the creek to retrieve cows or sheep that had wandered onto the neighbour’s land. There were a couple of places where trees had fallen over and formed rugged bridges. My dad would impress upon us that under no circumstances should we ever try to swim there. ‘It’s muddy bottomed,’ my father said. ‘It’s like quicksand. If you tried to touch the bottom you would sink and sink and never be able to get out.’ Just once, my brothers caught an eel there. They brought it home, where it was put in the freezer and duly forgotten. I now live on the land, with my children, where I calculate they are the fifth generation. I built a house next to my mother’s, with my husband. One summer when my children were small, on a particularly hot day, I announced that I didn’t believe the ‘sink to the bottom’ theory of the creek any more. I had seen neighbours’ animals cross it in their wanderings; there were patches where the bottom was firm enough to stand on, and shallow. The children and I put on wetsuits and jandals, loaded towels into a bag, and headed to the back of the farm. We assessed the creek bank. It was steep, and choked with Wandering Jew 29

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(I don’t think we are supposed to call it that any more). I chose the widest point of the creek and rolled under the electric fence wire. Shaded by native bush, the ground felt damp as I slid on my bottom into the water. The first thing my feet came into contact with was indeed mud. Soft and oozy, it forced its way between my toes, and it briefly occurred to me that maybe my father had been right. I also, equally briefly, contemplated eels. I wriggled my feet free, moving through the water that was roughly knee deep. With another step, the water was deeper, but I was on a firm base. It felt like wood beneath me, and I had the impression of petrified tree trunks and branches, fallen in and built up over the centuries to provide us with a floor. Over that first summer of swimming, I found the spots in the creek bed where the mud was firmer, and I could dig my toes into the bank to use it as a step to get in and out. I would return home from my swim with the skin of my knees rubbed, and long strokes of South Auckland clay painted onto my shins. My house was built in hope. Not all the history surrounding this piece of land is idyllic. My father was killed in a level-crossing accident on the farm when I was sixteen. A conversation between my mother and our extended family, which began with a disagreement about the wording of a bereavement notice to go into the Herald, suddenly unleashed years of petty squabbles, pentup resentments and emotions kept in check for too long. Things were said that could not be taken back. Overnight, the supportive cast of extended family was gone. Physically they were still there, just over the railway line, but we were separated by a chasm. By then my grandparents, along with the grandfather clock, had been moved to a modern kitset home, with indoor plumbing and a hot-water cylinder, over the road. The old house was demolished. Contact never resumed. I attended my grandmother’s funeral some years later, standing at the back of the chapel for the service. I didn’t bother for my grandfather. Pretty soon after his death, the aunt and uncle who lived over the tracks moved away. But my mother didn’t; she stayed. A succession of tenant farmers leased the land and ran stock. She learnt the workings of the pump that operated the bore and provided water for the troughs. When cattle wandered at night she went out with her torch and returned them to their rightful paddocks, away from the road or the railway line. She gifted me the third of the farm that 30

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would have been my inheritance, and I built my house. It was finished when I was heavily pregnant with my second child. My husband was a school teacher, a man who worked hard and liked order. The paddocks where buttercup and dock kept appearing pained him; the weeds that grew over the metal driveway and around the railway crossing were impertinent. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he complained, ‘playing with your horses and your dogs while I spend six hours every weekend mowing and weed-eating.’ After we separated no one wanted to buy a house on land the other side of an uncontrolled level crossing, so I borrowed all the money the bank would lend me and bought him out. My children attended Drury School. By then the oak tree was gone, struck by lightning during a storm. The trampoline was long, long gone. There are two classes in every year group now, and a flash hall with surround sound for prizegiving. The annual Calf Club Day is still a big event on the calendar. Either my mum or I attend to present the cup she and Dad donated for ‘best calf leading’. There is a diminishing field of calves and leaders each year, though. The animals are now secondary to the gala and fundraising aspect of the day. The village itself is a busy spot. When I was a teenager I worked weekends in the superette. My forward-thinking boss took space off the store to open a bakery, and put a Lotto outlet in the front. They all remain, between the butcher, the takeaway, and a café called the Vintner’s Table. There are now two other blocks of shops beside the original one. There’s a hairdresser’s, a flash housewares store and a large fruit and vege shop. The petrol station has an 8-pump modern forecourt, and the mechanics’ workshop behind it has serviced every car I’ve owned since my 1974 Toyota Corolla. The Jolly Farmer is now called Murphy’s Law, fitted out in a generic faux Irish pub motif. It doesn’t stop there. Through the roundabout where the Great South Road meets Waihoehoe, the shops and commercial premises go all the way to the motorway interchange now. There’s a marine upholsterer who also fixes my horse covers. Another bar, which started life as the bucolic Two Fat Cows, has had a variety of names since. For a while it was the venue of choice for the monthly meeting of my ante-natal mums’ group. There’s a saddlery store, an accountant’s and a boutique coffee roaster. 31

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After a protracted legal wrangle, Stevenson’s, who own the quarry at the base of the Drury hills, received permission to develop 360 hectares into an industrial subdivision. It’s expected to provide around 7000 jobs in the Drury area, and add a total of 19,000 Auckland wide. The locals put up a good fight. My friend Joanne from primary school was head of the Drury Preservation Society. My contribution was to buy fundraising jandals off her one summer. They had a pūkeko and the words ‘Keep Drury Rural’ printed on them. The farm next door to ours is being turned into a park. The motor-scrapers ran all day and some of the night for a whole summer, stripping the layer of topsoil down to clay. Dust blew across the paddock in a continuous stream. That winter, Auckland’s sixty consecutive days of rain revealed flaws in the drainage plans. The next summer the machines returned to correct the mistakes. The first door-knocking land-banker arrived soon after, trying to get an early bargain. He was the son of a local family who had transformed their land into the brand new Takanini Town Centre, about ten kilometres north. ‘It feels wrong when people call us developers,’ said the personable young man. ‘Grandad bought that land forty years ago. When the zoning changed, we decided to back ourselves and borrow a heap of money.’ His grandad was one of the long-established racehorse trainers in Takanini. The new town centre has a busy Warehouse store and a gastro-pub called The Blacksmiths, surrounded by high-density housing. I had no need to sell, then. Sure, I was mortgaged to my eyeballs, but I had a well-paid and secure job as a flight attendant. I filled the huge house with flatmates to help pay the bills. But divorce is a brutal thing, and my body revolted. I developed a chronic pain condition. Not long after I bought my husband out of the property, I remember looking out across the paddocks to the bush and the creek. I double-checked my flying roster—off to Los Angeles, reporting at 9pm that night. I still needed to mow the lawns, pack my bag, drop the dog to the kennels and try to get some sleep, all before work. I got sicker. When the opportunity came for redundancy, it seemed like the only way out. I took comfort in my lump-sum payout, but worried how long it would last. Liang, a high-achieving Chinese real estate agent, knocked at my door. 32

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‘Just give me a listing for one month,’ he said, ‘so that I can talk to the investors on my database. We know that in Flatbush and Takanini, the first land opened up for sections was on the edge of the parks.’ Suddenly my undesirable bit of land over a level crossing was viable. I thought it would be interesting to get some idea of its value. ‘I don’t want to move!’ my son protested, sitting on a branch above the creek. I floated on my back, mesmerised by the leaves above, dappled with sunlight. ‘We won’t have to,’ I told him. ‘We’ll sell it to investors who want to hold on to the land until the rules change and they can build lots of houses. That will make the land really valuable. We’ll rent it back off them until then.’ ‘So why don’t we keep it if it’s going to be really valuable?’ He had a point. I explained that that was still an option, but I wouldn’t have the resources to develop the land myself. At some point I would still have to sell. Within that month I had multiple offers. John and Jenny, which weren’t the names they were called on the sale and purchase agreement that came from Loo and Koo solicitors, were from Taiwan. They weren’t the highest bidders, but had the best understanding of why I wanted to stay and offered me a three-year tenancy; long enough to get the kids through school. They have global business interests but also a love for permaculture farming. The only condition they put on my lease was to have some land to plant the fruit trees John has been growing in containers in their back yard. Since the sale, a special housing area has been announced on the other side of Drury. One thousand houses will be built on sixty-eight hectares. That means it will likely take longer for my land to be subdivided. John and Jenny aren’t worried. They come and work on their trees, with occasional rests on the park bench they installed in the middle of the orchard. ‘When the fruit comes you must take some,’ they tell me. ‘These ones are Chinese plums, but they will grow more to the size of a mango.’ I needed somewhere new to anchor, and found it in the nearby village of Waiau Pa, about twenty kilometres west of Drury. I drove past swish thoroughbred horse studs, with orderly green pastures inside post and rail fences. Along the way were glimpses of the Manukau, and I thought of the waters from our creek making their way to the sea. The house is a small farm 33

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cottage, nicely renovated with a woodburner and plentiful insulation. It sits on a hectare, cut off a large cropping block. It still has the original orchard, with fruiting avocado trees and bushy citrus. In the village there’s a hardware store, and a café where they serve tea and coffee in bone china cups with gold edging. The petrol station has two pumps out front and a workshop. As it’s so close to the beach, I’ve told the kids we might get a kayak and a net for floundering. When the tide goes out, the mudflats extend for miles.

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SAM CLE MENTS

Radio Voice Dedicated to Kim Hill Velvety sensual, Tobacco hued, How the airwaves purr, Soothed by your luscious timbres, You, national treasure, Sweet aural nectar to the intellect’s ear, Sharp-tongued one, Of cutting wit and deep insight, Penetrator of the great and good, The brilliant minded, and pain filled, Melter of butter, from afar, Who captivates the budgerigar.

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MICHAEL STEVEN

Origin of ‘A Vale Undelivered’ ‘To Ben, at the Lake’ is considered to be among the most popular of Cilla McQueen’s poems. It appears in her first poetry collection, Homing In,1 and in two canonical anthologies, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry. The poem is important enough for McQueen to mention its genesis in her recent memoir In a Slant Light: Everyone’s still asleep but young Ben Webb. He and I might be the only people in the world, on the shore beside the tranquil lake. Here and there a blip, ripple— trout rising. Looking more closely at the water we observe myriad insects trampolining on the surface tension.2

Writing as part of a recent feature on Cilla McQueen on the Otago University Press website, Ian Wedde says this about the poem: ‘To Ben, at the Lake’ has been a favourite of mine from the start, it has those qualities of precision, delicacy and that uncanny moment when depth appears within or below elegant surface—or, as Barthes memorably wrote of photographs, ‘Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow toward man and begins to look at him.’3

My reasons for responding to this particular poem are twofold. Both relate to the person to whom the poem is dedicated: the brilliant but troubled Dunedin artist Ben Webb, son of the printmaker, arts educator and environmentalist Marilynn Webb. The act of re-reading Cilla McQueen’s poem became a kind of psychic springboard; an open portal back to a time when I lived in Dunedin and associated with Ben. It also was an overdue prompt to address my conflicting feelings surrounding his unnecessary and untimely death in September 2014, as well as his legacy as a man and artist. Secondly, I am interested in how the poem’s speaker addresses the child, using deceptively simple language to articulate complex relational ideas about different aspects of surface, in such a short poem. Further to these reasons, I also believe McQueen’s poem may 36

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have presaged—or inspired—the development of what is today considered to be a significant and celebrated aspect of Webb’s practice as a visual artist. All great metaphors have an inextricable meaning and applicability; for any metaphor to endure, both qualities must be renewable and regenerative. In ‘To Ben, at the Lake’ the central metaphor is surface. The poem’s preliminary lines present the reader with a deceptively simple comparative connection between the human body and water, ‘See, Ben, the water/ has a strong soft skin.’ There is something at once familiar and yet uncannily startling about the pairing of the words ‘strong’ and ‘soft’. Is it because, despite their opposition, they align effortlessly like the atoms in magnetised metals? Or is the identification more to do with our sense of tactility? Do we implicitly recognise these as being two qualities of our own skin? At this point in the poem, as the notion of surface is questioned, the metaphor’s complexity deepens. The image develops adroitly. What seems on first reading to be a whimsical expositional description, ‘insects dance/ and jump about in it—/ for them it’s as safe as/ springy turf ’, is loaded with visual and zoological information. As in a haiku, there is an ulterior or deeper meaning concealed beneath the apparent simplicity of the surface language. In fifteen words the reader learns as much about the behaviour of insects, in their habitative environment, as they would watching a wildlife documentary. The tone of the poem is declarative and consistently gentle. One imagines the voice of an adult explaining phenomena of the natural world to a curious child. Midway through the poem, the speaker’s address shifts from observations about the lake, to what could almost be considered as a piece of encouraging existential advice for the young Ben Webb: You see, it is a matter of ensuring that you are lighter than the medium you walk on: in other words, first check your meniscus And also, to hell with the trout—you can’t afford to look down, anyway.4 37

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary definition of meniscus is ‘the curved upper surface of a liquid in a tube’; also, ‘a lens that is convex on one side and concave on the other’. Lastly, the word has an anatomical application, ‘a thin fibrous cartilage between the surface of some joints, e.g. the knee’. McQueen’s usage is accurate in all three contexts. It’s as if a strange multiplicity is activated here; the line becomes a kind of theoretical prism, focalising the poem’s exoteric and esoteric concerns. The poem itself is a meniscus; it is the surface of an experience; a lens into an experience; and the connective transmission of that experience from author to reader. The poem concludes: You and I have lots of golden sticky clay on our gumboots—the world is holding us up very well, today.5

Without being didactic, McQueen’s poem reminds us that while our lives are playing out on the surface of the world, the life of the world is also playing out on the surface of our bodies. The line ‘first check your meniscus’ became the entry point for my response. For days I carried it around in my head. Each time I spoke it aloud, I found myself constellating new associations and insights about the poem and its addressee. The image of the meniscus as surface and lens, for some inexplicable reason, brings me back to scenes from the films of Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky. Water is a recurring motif in his films: like the figure of Narcissus, people in the throes of madness are transfixed by their reflection in stagnant pools; streams rille over animal corpses, arcane flora and silted earth; a man stares out through a rain-glazed window while it rains on his head. These images have a strange archetypal and elemental poetic power. McQueen’s poem has a similar quality. Of its composition, she writes: In the clarity of water, air, idea, ‘To Ben, at the Lake’ wrote itself before breakfast. The idea of the meniscus joined a little homily about living in this world.6

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MICHAEL STEVEN

In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, ‘Always remember Heraclitus’ view that the death of earth is to become water.’7 This phrase is applicable to Tarkovsky, and also reminds me of my earliest encounters with the works for which Ben Webb is best known. Starting off as a painter, inspired by secondwave German Expressionists, Ben eventually refined his practice to the treatment of photograph images gathered from different sources—film noir and Hammer horror movies; morgue shots of deceased men and women; rare and poisonous flowers; various lepidopteran specimens—which were all enlarged and printed onto A1 sheets of Canson and Fabriano cartridge paper. The images were then treated with various solvents and pigments; to which the effect was to render the subject trapped or preserved in the moment of death, beneath the surface (or meniscus) of a lake or body of water. My first encounter with these works happened shortly after moving to Dunedin. The man I lodged with in Cargill Street, Peter Entwisle, was a former head curator of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, a local historian, and perhaps the greatest supporter of Ben’s work. On the wall of his upstairs room hung one of the morgue shot series: a woman of either Eurasian or Latin American decent, with bruising and a thin laceration passing across the middle of her throat. There is no denying the injuries that undoubtedly caused her death were horrific; and yet beneath the filmic haze she seemed at peace with what had transpired as her destiny. Her dark hair was mussed; her eyes seemed to be squinting; there was almost a smile crossing her slightly parted lips. In my poem I describe the subjects of these works as being ‘haunted perfectly’. There was nothing extraneous, overblown or underrealised about his treatment. They achieved a state of grace. In the hands of an artist with lesser ability these images would appear gratuitous, bathetic— or, worse still, morbidly insensitive towards the deceased. Weeks later I met Ben. He came into the second-hand bookstore I worked at, on a Saturday. He wore a knee-length drab green leather coat with wide lapels, the type of coat a Ukranian gangster might wear. It was the middle of the day, and he had with him a large bottle of Pasqua: an inexpensive but drinkable Italian red wine. After introductions and acknowledgement of mutual acquaintances, we sat drinking in the store’s bay window. He immediately struck me as something of a braggart. He boasted about being a self-educated artist; of his many successful exhibitions, both here and 39

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overseas; of being the godson of New Zealand’s then most famous living painter. He was like a child who wants everyone to know how many toys he has, yet hidden behind this veneer was an irreverent, authentic intelligence, and curiosity. It was these aspects of his personality—as well as his artistry— that I found endearing. I think, like most artists, he struggled to contain his vulnerability. When I paid compliment to the works of his I had seen, he scoffed at me, got up from his chair, straightened his coat, and left the store without saying a further word. Days later, I arrived at work to find a book of poetry and a note from Ben, saying how much he’d enjoyed our meeting. It was a thoughtful gift, and evinced a capacity for great generosity. As I allude to in my poem below, he was once a close friend to many of my friends. I am not interested in sullying the reputation of someone who is no longer alive to defend himself; neither do I wish to contribute unduly to mythmaking. It is for these reasons I have chosen not to name the friends with whom he fell out, or divulge the reasons why. In the somewhat tribal milieu of artists, musicians, book dealers I moved among during my time in Dunedin, associating with Ben was considered disloyal. Some even went as far to regard it as traitorous. Yet I never had any reason to dislike him; never in his company was my safety compromised. Our interactions were nearly always congenial, except for the last time I saw him: the scene depicted in my poem is an accurate transcription of that afternoon’s events. After he drunkenly declared his originality and the lack of influence in his practice, I noticed a pile of monographs hidden beneath some rags. The monographs were of various German artists, and it was obvious he had been inspired by their examples. The expression his face assumed on realising I had seen the hidden books was that of a child who has just been caught lying. Midway through 2013 I moved back to Auckland to get off drugs and alcohol. When my health returned, I shifted into a two-room bach at the top of the Karekare hill. I filled my days reading books and writing drafts of new poems. News of Ben’s death came from my friend, poet Richard Reeve. On the day of musician Peter Gutteridge’s funeral, Ben had taken his own life at a crib in Aramoana. It is hard for me to distinguish between the Ben Webb addressed in ‘To Ben, at the Lake’ and the Ben Webb I knew in adulthood. Both had an enduring innocence, and I think the behavioural traits abhorred by others were perhaps symptomatic of an inability to adapt to life as an adult. 40

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Martin Heidegger writes, ‘The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn is the founding of truth.’8 I hope my response poem serves the purpose of being truthful to a complex and sensitive person. A man who was a son, a friend and a talented artist who, during his short life, made a significant contribution to New Zealand art. A Vale Undelivered It was on a night of hard sleet and thunder barrelling across the Waitakere Ranges. I was newly sober. Word of your death came by text message from a poet you threatened with a rusty machete. In a two-room shack, I smoked: thinking of the many alcoholics I had known. All of us children trapped in the purgatory of adult bodies. Wisps of white cloud hung from Mt Cargill like the beard of some ancient Chinese sage; the day I saw you last. An afternoon. The southern sky irreducible to description. Crossing Stuart Street to buy wine from the supermarket I held my tongue, as one by one, you derided my friends: This one, the junkie; that one, the bogus Marxist; the other one the trustafarian; the rest, failed academics; sluts. The same friends who were once also your friends, before (as you liked, or had to, put it) they turned everyone in town against you. Back in your studio among the years’ detritus, bottles of noxious solvents you floated over photographs of dead women, men, poisonous flowers and butterflies like stills from a Von Trier or Tarkovsky, haunted perfectly beneath the meniscus of a chemical lake; rilles of graffiti carved into decades old palimpsest layers of acrylic paint 41

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we drank; and as we drank, you slurred: declaring yourself the only true original artist, devoid of any influences. You said nothing when I saw a hidden pile of monographs: Egon Schiller, Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger— you didn’t need to. I knew then to find my own way out. I followed the powder bowl moon back to Cargill Street. The rash acts that marred your talent: forgotten or forgiven. They were all farce. You were charming, ebulliently cussed. A child trapped in an adult’s body. Unlovable you were not.

NOTES 1 Cilla McQueen, Homing In, John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1981. 2 Cilla McQueen, In a Slant Light, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2016. 3 Ian Wedde, Cilla McQueen: Poets’ Picks, Otago University Press: www.otago.ac.nz/press/news/ otago598249.html 4 Cilla McQueen, Homing In. 5 Ibid. 6 Cilla McQueen, In a Slant Light. 7 Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Early Greek Philosophy, trans. Johnathan Barnes, Penguin, London, 1987. 8 Martin Heidegger, ‘The origin of the work of art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, London, 1971.

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JAN KEMP

Remembering Harry Russell Haley (April 1934, Dewsbury, UK to 2 July 2016, Whangarei, NZ) for Jean, Ian & Kei, and for Cheryl I am a man half in love with time Tonight I present my back to my future I wear my body sideways and only my third eye has an epicanthic fold. —‘Turtle Time’, Russell Haley

That’s death. A full stop. And life goes on. As if you were writing that in one of your stories where every word matters, as a life does. Yours did. Pull out the stops. And I weep in a medieval church you’ll never enter and a park where you’ll never go, except as a sparrow and as you did yesterday. Why, sparrow, why? Why sit and look at me from a stone slab at the flowerbed’s edge? I asked and asked, and you looked and looked. A chat you might say. Then I said: ‘I’ll carefully, quietly take out my Smartphone and photograph you. Don’t move!’ And away you flew. That was you, Russell, wasn’t it? Flew up a hemisphere to tell me you’d flown out the window where Jean, Ian, Kei, Cheryl and Ian Wedde were with you, till Ian Wedde said: ‘Let’s open the windows’ … and at 7:45am on Monday 4 July, in Whangarei, New Zealand, always a man for exactitude, out you flew. Took you two days to get here to let me know. That was pretty quick. You’re a good flyer. I remember you flying kites with Pat Hanly in a poem, so long ago. I take out the photo albums, searching for memory in print to send to Jean. I find a few. You, Jean, me, a partly obscured child behind us coming up from the beach at Bethells where we’d spent a weekend with Denis Taylor, Helen and their tiny son Jude. I’m in my soft Afghanistan leather jacket that got stolen in the Kiwi pub. Jean’s hair is blonde and cropped like the toetoe. You’re in a seaman’s jersey, and Ian’s knee’s just showing. Kathy’s completely obscured. Her terrible motorbike accident as a pillion rider. You said you’d

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never get over it, you two wouldn’t; parents should go before their children do. Talking. That was the thing. It helped to talk. And to wail & weep. You always talked. And talked and talked. ‘The only Yorkshire surrealist in New Zealand,’ Karl Stead said once. And you always thought, perhaps bitingly. A lad from Huddersfield, said without the aitch and less like ‘udders’ than like ‘ooders’. The English can talk, I’d always thought. We can’t. Or couldn’t then. But you didn’t want to be English any more. You were immigrant Brits. You were British Aussie Kiwis. You were Kiwis. And you helped me to start to think, Russell. You told me painstakingly what ‘class’ means in society and that you were lower-middle and Jean was upper-middle. And that you’d met her collecting her ticket on a tram, and that I was bourgeois. I learned so much from you. To have a cup of tea, for a break, for a get-together, afternoon chat anytime chat; to sit around your wooden table and talk, while Jean made it, smilingly. And you set out the cups while saying how my brain, according to Jung, according to you, had its intellectual power in recess, its emotional response in forefront. How that would change over time and that later my thinking would show. What a mad bugger you were and loved to be! Parties. That old clock that fell off the wall in the pole house when we all danced. We stopped time! Harry Russell Haley with barrel chest out and a lion’s mane, poncing on the stage as Harry Lurber with Alan Brunton. Or in overdrive over something, someone, lurching out. And funny, funny, funny, you were. We couldn’t not laugh and join in and over-the-top sob together, or as likely not, if you thought that showed gushing romantic sentiment. What lessons. And you were a kind man. Do you remember you and Jean inviting me to live in your 11 Pentland Avenue, Mt Eden, house as a boarder when I had no one, nowhere to go to? And how when I shot off to Papua New Guinea or where was it to, all unexpected, you stored my Malaysian bamboo furniture, papers, clothes, whatever I couldn’t fit into a couple of suitcases, in your under-the-house; my cutlery, crockery and the bamboo furniture eventually becoming yours? But all my other specially chosen junk, bookshelves, books, for years you patiently stored. And then when Bonnie the American, who came from Port Moresby once to help me house-sit and found Michael’s gift bottle of fine sherry in the sideboard, which she nipped into every night, you quietly replaced it, explaining to me how Michael might be miffed she’d 44

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drunk it. Not you two. I hadn’t even noticed, Bonnie needing me very much not to, in trying to kick her habit. And then all your addresses! You two had to stay on the move. From the city to the wilds of Waiwera from there to who knows where and there and there and then there and three weeks before you go, to Whangarei. You knew nothing stands still: panta rei off by heart. Though you always consulted Jean. She was your heart. And what about your friends? The so many who stuck with you through it all: Ian Wedde, Murray Edmond, Ray Smith, the Kislers, the Hanlys, the Hingleys, the Eyleys, Michael, the Meades—have I forgotten anyone? The family, Cheryl and Ecky; Ian of course and Kei. And those you lost, who gave up on you, how it hurts when you are loyal and don’t know quite why you lost them. Someone will talk more about your writing: I remember your absolute love of words, their exacting placements; how Jonti said: ‘Russell is a master of English prose’; how your slant on things was sometimes quite askew, a bit shadowy, rather than full of light, rightly sometimes. How you would pore over a sentence. How you demanded of me exact and not blurred speech. I must look it all up again and see how you did it. Hear your voice. All the books are on my shelves still: The Transfer Station, Real Illusions … My heart and head fill with the times you looked after me like an older brother, with such lovely merriment—sorry to use an outdated word, Russell—but you were a merry man! Cheery. Positive. And also as naïve, sometimes, as I was then. Look at your somehow innocent and grateful response—thrilled when the post came and it was a fine letter from Robert Creeley, or New Directions had written back and accepted a story. And how you knew you’d never be Mr Literary New Zealand or the Kiwi Poet Laureate of Prose, and so went bush. How brave and wise of you. Gone. Gone walking and looking. Showing us and naming every green blade, like a word. Loving and knowing the land, the sea, the birds, the plants in their every gesture. As we now remember your gestures, dear Russell. Your earth, sky, foliage. Adieu, dear friend! You shall always be part of each of us who still remain and who so loved you in return. 7/8 July 2016, Kronberg im Taunus, Germany

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M.D. RANN

Te Horotiu, October 1972 Trees dance in Albert Park, I saw them. The roots of pōhutukawa bathed in moss, caress the sodden earth, branches entwined like dancers’ limbs, sinews stretched before fingers’ flame. A tree Olympiad, but not of  Tāne’s making. English oaks and Norfolk pine compete for light. Senegal date and phoenix palm, jostle with yew, rātā and cabbage tree. The leaves listen and watch. Lazy students slumber while others cram, sprawled amongst their books. Pimply lovers kiss, perfumed by magnolia, watched by the stony eyes of  Victoria and Grey. In Speakers’ Corner, with ‘amplification’ banned by civic ordinance, no birdsong, no bellbird’s call, is heard above the honking laugh, of Shadbolt, and chants of HART and CND. Hairy boys in army surplus protest Vietnam. Hemi has died, they’re burying him in Jerusalem, amongst his kūmara. Death, not poverty, has set him free. For Norm, and Eden, not long now. On Jumping Sunday a rock band plays 46

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in the rotunda, where muskets fired and warriors fought at Te Horotiu. Bill falls drunk, between the arms of the floral clock, where time stands still in Albert Park and the trees remember.

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NICHOLAS REID

Sun Strike Our Saturday night sights, we nursed the suds, one Guinness each, and watched the thick straight rim of froth above the blackness, notional Roman collar, ersatz Celtic colour, in local suburban lounge-bar, fake tracery of armorial bearings, clan shields, ye olde Scots pub an atmosphere bought as template. And dodged the patio of young men’s voices raucous and boastful in beer, young women’s compliant and cackling at anecdotes of highway and football field, the race channel turned far too loud. This was the moment grabbed for you and me to unwind the yarn, smooth the skein, re-work the week. It was a trial, I’d say, of sound and sight. Until the going sun, hard orange ball, fell between houses opposite, striking full on your west-turned face with odd and salmon-subtle glow, respectful nostalgic spotlight. Ye olde fake and patio gone in one passing second’s light, the sun’s last shot. It was enough. 48

N ICK ASCROFT

Pity the Composer The apex of their momentary tubercle, tuberculous, hurrumphing at a stave, it bursts. Composers let their public circle in their thoughts: these women, purple, grave, chain-smoking, tilling coal in factories, and men, who creak exhausted into armchairs. An organ cranes to offer back to these unfortunates a melody as balm, hears one dropping on a rope, and swings it like a noose. Gadzooks. But no. No lunatic of music, dashed on opium, can mic an amp and fill that whistled tune a thick and brutish ear desires, finding closure. Pity, hand to forehead, the composer.

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CH RIS TSE

Sensibilities  pop-up bar—borrowed fame—tripping down the road to shame soda pop—dirty pop—piece by piece like Robocop electropop—chamber pop—it’s all culled from the same crop doo-wop—Sub Pop—c’mon DJ, work that drop pop/rock—shock jocks—the hits don’t reach us in the wops J & K-pop—Canto pop—Ezra Pound is on the hop teen pop—mindless slop—we all pray to Iggy Pop Artpop—mom & pop—hipsters trash the candy shop pop quiz—pop tart—15 minutes for Left Shark bottle pop—major flop—the rollercoaster has to stop Luftballon—the weasel pops—idols tumble from the top superpop—Novocain—oh! if I only had a brain!

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K E R R I N P. S H A R P E

she has days when she’s back she has days when she’s back in a Tokyo laundry feeding the mangle enough white sheets for The Feast of the Dead days with the chance to free the world’s insects from one hundred detachable collars days when it took hours to fold pillowslips into tiny lanterns for huge hotel beds days when there was a difference between a laundered dove and a sparrow laid out in snow

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ELIZABETH SMITHER

The Filipina Maid Makes the Bed I’ve got back my enthusiasm for bed making from the Filipina maid who made mine on the fourth floor of the flash hotel. I was over beds until she showed me how carelessly and with what brio it can be done. ‘You’ve got one more night,’ she said. Then carefree was the mode for pulling up the sheets as if I were already in it, for tugging the duvet up to my neck. For seizing the bedding by the throat and giving it a shake of grace. One night does not mean removing all the makeup, just the eyes, the surface she patted was for her supervisor and yet it had an affection in it which I have transferred to bed making now I’m home. One more day, I think, tugging at the covers and tautening the mattress protector as I go quickly into the new day I’m seizing by the neck as the Filipina maid did in Room 424.

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ELIZABETH SMITHER

The Rosin Box Ribbons tied and ends tucked under we clopped to the rosin box a little trough with stars in it to dab each pointe shoe near the blocks. The last illusion: that we should float (didn’t Markova weigh a ton when Dolin lifted her? A little leap was all she gave him: he made the arc he carried her on.) Just now before the rosin sticks we are heavy, earthbound maidens aiming to become ballerinas. In the wings, in the olfactory theatre the rosin is the triggering scent like a trumpet for war horses. I imprint the boards while stepping forward wearing stardust on my feet and stardust-to-come in every limb sinew, bone and muscle blend as I rise en pointe under the proscenium.

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RUTH ARNISON

Trains The railcar stops at the bottom of our garden. We wave to the drivers and tell Mum who gets off or on. This afternoon Mrs Stewart landed on the platform all pillow fat and round, like a pincushion. Mum said Penroses had a sale this week so that would explain the pillows. The wallpaper ballet dancers in my bedroom wobble and billow when the trains rattle shake past our house. Dad says there’s a kind of sacking under the wallpaper so it’s not my dancers’ fault their pliés aren’t perfect.

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CLAIRE ORCHARD

Hide and Seekers We were playing the rainy Saturday away at Nick the neighbour boy’s house. My turn to hide and I’d chosen to fold myself into the cupboard under the stairs, barely breathing, crouching among a stash of old supermarket bags, a yard broom, hoover, bucket and mop. Nick’s mum was helping him hunt. Through a chink in the door I saw her upend a blue and white vase that lived in a white plaster niche in the wall and gently jiggle it while Nick watched intently, as if I could really be in there, curled into a tight ball. That’s how small we were. We thought the people we were looking for could be anywhere. When my turn came I hunted high and low for him: in pots and pans, in jumbled kitchen drawers, in half-empty cereal boxes, in the reflection of the mirror hanging on the turn of the stairs, for the longest time in the obviously fake backgrounds of  TV shows set in imaginary, faraway lands.

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Lucy When there’s a stretch of road straight enough she won’t need the gearstick and handbrake for a while, Lucy reaches her left hand into the ripped side of the Pepsi Max 24-pack that sits in the passenger seat, feeling around for a full can. She holds it between her thighs while she pops it open and, after an ecstatic gulp, wedges it back in there—a bit cold on her crotch, even through her jeans—to turn a corner. Her car has no cup holders. She likes to tell people proudly that it’s because the car was designed before canned soft drink was invented, but she has no idea whether this is true. It also has a radio that is 100 per cent white noise at all times, and a cassette player that can only rewind tapes. Her laptop is balanced on top of the cardboard box of Pepsi, sliding around when she turns corners but never quite falling, and playing at top volume through its tinny speaker, ‘Good morning baby, I hope I’m gonna make it through another day … Good morning baby, I hope I’m gonna make it through another day …’ This is the second most played song in her iTunes library; she plays it on repeat every weekday all the way to work, and it seems to have just as much of a part in her waking up as the low-calorie caffeinated beverage (and the adrenaline of occasionally not putting the drink down quickly enough and having to swing around a roundabout with just one hand and an elbow to steer). The most played song is ‘Asleep’ by The Smiths, which she plays nine times on repeat on a 37-minute and 21-seconds playlist seven nights of the week as she tries to get to sleep. It’s hard to tell which is harder, going to sleep or waking back up again, but this morning is going okay. She can feel the cold bubbly caffeine—her second can today—getting into her blood and linking her feet with her brain, her hands with her eyes. Everything’s coming together. She’s had breakfast, a new routine that she has only just started but is pleased with. Half an English muffin, two egg whites and half a cup of spinach, with salt and pepper. Just over 100 calories altogether, and plenty to keep her going until morning-tea time. 56

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* She can feel herself deflate as she opens the classroom door to a wall of noise. A room full of small bodies wailing, rocking, muttering, masturbating … It’s going to be one of those days. ‘It must be a full moon tonight!’ she comments to Darcy and Paula, the other support staff, as she puts her bag away. ‘I think you’re probably right.’ ‘Yeah! That explains it.’ A reassuring, routine conversation that they have whenever the class have a rough day. Porsche seems particularly agitated; every time the staff look away, she pinches other children on the backs of their necks, but then shouts at herself, ‘Porsche! No pinching!’ and bursts into tears, slapping her own face and pulling at her hair. Each time this happens, one of the staff calms her down, finds a book she likes and reads it to her, brushes her hair for her and puts it back in a nice plait, but then gets distracted by some other minor catastrophe. When they turn away, Porsche starts to pinch again. The whole routine has happened four of five times by the time the 9 o’clock bell rings to begin the school day and the classroom teacher, Sarskia, rushes in the door and starts the morning song playing: ‘Welcome Room Two! It’s so nice to be with you. What shall we do todayyyy?’ They slowly herd the children into a semi-circle in front of the SmartBoard. * In Morning Greetings every student has a song, which stays the same for every day of the year. The staff sing and sign their way through each of them, while the students seem mostly uninterested. Paula is the most forceful of the support staff, probably because she’s the oldest, from a generation where doing things for the children and saying they did it was apparently de rigueur. Now she grabs Michael’s hands and moves them in a vague appropriation of the sign language version of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, and he shouts, ‘BUH BUH BUH BUH BUH’ in protest. By the time ‘Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy’ is playing, Lucy is already wondering (not for the first time) whether to leave and find a job in a café or supermarket. She likes the idea of wearing dresses and showing cleavage and not having to have her hair tied up all the time; being in a room where the air 57

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doesn’t smell of stale spit; having conversations about politics or pop culture, while listening to music that doesn’t feel the need to teach you things. No one could possibly be this passionate about fruit salad. But every job ad says Experience Necessary, and she has none. She can’t help thinking that adults probably are much scarier than kids. This is okay. She knows how this world works. ‘Now we’ve had our fruit salad today … uh huh huh … it’s time to put the scraps away … uh huh huh … wash the bowl and wash the spoon … let’s do it all again real soon!’ * At morning tea, Lucy tries not to look overly interested in the children’s lunchboxes. Some of the kids she does Home Support for won’t eat at all and have enteral feeding, or live on sickly smelling milks full of vitamins and protein and calories, but this is a class of big eaters. Bradley will sometimes chew up his food and then spit it onto his hand, or yours, but most of the time everyone swallows everything they’re given. She looks at Porsche, the only girl in the class, long and lean, already starting to look womanly at eight years old. She has to be reminded to breathe in between bites. The four boys have younger bodies. Lucy loves the softness of their cheeks and the way their upper arms curve roundly into their elbows. Mostly their lunchboxes are full of packaged supermarket snacks, and the occasional white-bread sandwich, but it makes her happy to watch them consume so mindlessly. She tears open their little plastic packets for them, and wipes biscuit crumbs away from the edges of their mouths, resenting the song playing in the background, which seems to mock their lack of control over the food that they’re given: ‘When you want something crunchy … when you want something sweet … fruits and vegetables … are always fun to eat. Yeah! … Have a snack … Yeah! … Have a snack …’ Sarskia leads the children off to the playground while the support staff have a 20-minute break. Darcy says, ‘Coming to the staffroom for once, Lucy?’ but she mumbles back, ‘Sorry … course work …’ and goes out to the street to sit in her car instead. She takes out the Correspondence School folder that’s supposed to help her make it to uni one day, and stares at a randomly opened page while she sinks into the first sip of a new can of Pepsi Max and eats carrot sticks with a carefully measured tablespoon of hummus. 58

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* Sarskia has a new maths game. She’s bought a toy frying pan and five plastic sausages. The staff sing, ‘Five fat sausages sizzling in a pan … five fat sausages sizzling in a pan … but if one goes POP and the others go BANG … there’ll be four fat sausages sizzling in a pan …’ The children are supposed to each have a turn making sure the number of sausages in the pan matches the number being sung. None of them seems to understand, but Sarskia says it will take time, and for now the staff can show them. When Porsche is handed a plastic sausage, she pulls down her pants and says, ‘You’re okay, pretty girl, you’re okay,’ moving it between her legs. Sarskia bursts into tears. She’s a first-year teacher and she knows that wellexperienced Paula must think she’s terrible. She knew about the history of abuse—should she have seen this coming? Lucy gently helps Porsche back into her trousers, takes her hand and leads her outside. They walk in circles around the small school field. Porsche is walking on her tiptoes. She says, ‘The wheels on the bus!’ ‘Yeah, the wheels on the bus,’ Lucy replies. ‘Round and round and round and round and round and round!’ Porsche says. Eventually she starts to cry and grabs a handful of the skin on the back of Lucy’s arm, making eye contact for the first time all day as she digs in her nails and starts to break the skin. Lucy strokes her hand until the fingers relax. ‘You’re a nice girl, Porsche. Come one, you’re a good girl. Let’s go inside.’ * Every Wednesday afternoon Sarskia has professional development and a reliever called Rebecca takes over the class. Today is Wednesday. Paula mutters, ‘Fuck me sideways, here we go!’ as the end of lunchtime bell rings and they see the vaguely purple asymmetrical hairdo bobbing past the windows as Rebecca approaches the classroom door. Darcy and Lucy laugh; the combination of Paula’s age and crudeness has never quite come together in their heads, but they’re nervous too. Rebecca has a special way of making everyone feel uncomfortable. Today, she announces that they won’t be following the lesson plan that Sarskia left. ‘It’s ridiculous that you’re trying to teach these kids to read,’ she says 59

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cheerfully. ‘When are they ever going to read? Let’s stop pretending!’ Paula asks, ‘So, what are we going to do this afternoon, then?’ And Rebecca says, ‘We’ll take them to the playground! Why not just let them have fun? Who knows what they’re going through at home, poor things?’ Lucy knows Bradley and Lou aren’t interested in the playground, so she brings Bradley a few little plastic discs to spin on the floor, and he crouches beside them squeaking happily. She sits on top of the wooden picnic table and gathers Lou onto her lap, tucking his face into her neck and singing quietly into his ear, ‘Oh hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep … Curl me up inside you and let me hear you through the heat … Oh oh oh …’ He relaxes so completely that he wets himself, and the urine spreads across the thighs of her jeans, turning the denim from pale grey to almost black. ‘Hey guys, I’ve got a toileting emergency to deal with,’ she calls to the other staff and walks him back to the classroom. * When they return, each in a fresh set of clothes, Rebecca has taken their place at the picnic table and is eating a large bag of pretzels. Lucy would like to think of herself as a good person who doesn’t judge others by their appearance, but she finds a lot of satisfaction in how ridiculous Rebecca looks. Her big body is pushed into an expensive colour co-ordinated A-line skirt and jacket with three-dimensional flowers sewn onto it, her mouth moving floppily around pretzel after pretzel. ‘I’m taking Garcinia Cambogia pills for weight loss at the moment,’ Rebecca calls out, once she feels Lucy is within earshot. ‘But they make me so hungry, I have to snack every hour. I feel like this is going to work for me, though! I’ve read all these articles …’ Lucy is trying to think of a way to escape the conversation, but she knows Lou won’t be convinced to do anything other than sit and cuddle. She wants to pick him up and carry him over to where Darcy and Paula are gossiping and keeping an eye on the playing children, but staff really aren’t supposed to carry students around; she probably signed something in her contract about it. She tries to drown out the talking by singing loudly inside her head, ‘People are strange … when you’re a stranger … faces seem ugly … when you’re alone …’, and sits down beside Rebecca, holding Lou’s soft stomach tighter than usual for comfort. 60

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‘I mean, you don’t know what it’s like!’ Rebecca tells her. ‘You’re young, you bounce back, you can do whatever you want to yourself … but just wait till you’re old and fat like me!’ * It’s only now that she’s lingering at the lower end of ‘healthy weight’ that people are comfortable bringing this sort of thing up with her. In her high school years, Lucy was so thin her head looked too big for her body, her skin was bruised along the bones it was so close to. She pushed away her friends, and her brain refused to let her get the credits necessary to be granted university entrance. The doctor referred her to a nutritionist, and instructed her ten times to see the school counsellor. The counsellor was lovely—young and curly-haired and wrapped in shawls—but she was obsessively thin too, and they would silently compare the bruises on the fronts of their legs as they talked about what love feels like, and how one day they’d like to travel. She sent letters to Lucy in class, in envelopes full of glitter and covered in stickers. They’d say things like: ‘Remember: You are great! You are loved! You matter! Please come and see me at 1pm tomorrow (Tuesday).’ She lent Lucy a book called The Red Tree by Shaun Tan and said that the guy she liked had given it to her. Lucy took it home wrapped in newspaper so it wouldn’t get damaged in her backpack, but she never got the chance to give it back. The next day at school she heard that the young counsellor was unexpectedly gone. ‘Ha, probably pregnant!’ voices said, but Lucy thought that was a body that probably couldn’t get pregnant. She left class just before 1pm anyway, and spent the scheduled hour sitting in a toilet cubicle with her head between her knees, whisper-singing, ‘L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N … You’ve got more than money and sense my friend … You’ve got heart … And you go in your own way …’ Nobody ever asked her whether she wanted to see the new counsellor. * She spent a lot of time in toilet cubicles back then. Her dad took the necessary weight gain to heart and started to pack her lunchboxes with homemadebread sandwiches, thickly buttered, and giant slices of cheese in between. She couldn’t dismiss something so full of caring, even though the greasy weight of them made cold acid rise in her throat. She would bring a knife to school and sit in a locked cubicle scraping butter 61

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from the bread, and rubbing it onto toilet paper, wrapping the cheese up with it, and putting the bundle into the sanitary bin. After that, she would cut away a generous crust, so that a small square of the middle of the bread was left— the nicest bit, soft and yeasty. She’d eat it in tiny, slow bites. It’s years since she left high school, but the over-the-top fragrance of sanitary bin deodorant still makes her think of cheese. Cheese and everyone finally taking her advice, and leaving her alone. ‘What have I become, my sweetest friend … Everyone I know goes away in the end …’ ‘Sorry, what?’ asks Rebecca. She’s been talking this whole time, unaware that Lucy is ignoring her. ‘Oh nothing, I was just singing,’ says Lucy. ‘Singing what? It sounded quite nice … I didn’t know you were musical. You young people are full of surprises. Here I am doing the only thing I’ve ever done—you could do anything!’ * ‘What about the kids?’ Lucy doesn’t acknowledge the compliment, ‘Haven’t you seen Rain Man? Maybe these guys have secret talents too. I saw Michael spelling out the names of the trains from Thomas the Tank Engine with letter blocks the other day.’ Rebecca smiles sympathetically, ‘He’s eight, darling. I know that’s great for someone like him, but any other eight-year-old could do that easily. Don’t worry about them, okay? They’ll be in sheltered care once they’re out of school; they’ll be fine.’ Lucy laughs when she relates the conversation in whispers to Darcy and Paula in the corner of the classroom. They are putting away resources while Rebecca tries desperately to get all five children’s lunchboxes into their backpacks and bags onto their backs. ‘Did you tell her Lou is quite good at maths?’ Darcy asks. ‘Nah, I was worried she’d smuggle him off to a casino. Try to raise herself money for weight-loss surgery or something.’ Darcy laughs. ‘Hey, well if she did, at least we could easily get her fired.’ Paula nods angrily. ‘We could run this class better for an afternoon just the three of us than with her here getting paid our whole fucking day’s wages for every hour she does nothing.’

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They take the children out to the cars and vans and taxis that will drive them home, then Lucy goes back to her own car and drives to Jack’s house for Home Support. The whole way there she plays, ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me … FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME …’ and sings along whenever she’s not stuck at a traffic light. * She waits at Jack’s gate for his ‘bus’—a van that takes him and one other student home from school. His mother, Nina, walks out to meet her on the path and hands her a square origami box with a bow around it. Lucy remembers obsessively making stacks of the same type of box when she was eight or nine years old, and wonders whether Jack’s younger sister is going through a similar phase. When she opens the box she sees four brown blobs inside. ‘Jack and I made you some chocolate truffles,’ Nina says. ‘We wanted to thank you for everything you do. A lot of people come and go in his life, but you’ve stuck around even when things have been tough, and you’re very special. To the whole family.’ Truffles are made from cream, sugar, melted chocolate, possibly some sort of liquor, or maybe nuts. And these are very big truffles. She tries frantically to add up the calories in her head, and estimates about 150 per blob. Nina’s face is open and expectant. Lucy says, ‘Oh wow, that’s so lovely, thank you!’ and lifts one to her mouth, biting off 75 calories without tasting a thing through the cold horror in her chest and throat. As soon as she has tongued it away from the backs of her teeth and the roof of her mouth she eats the other half, and then smiles as gratefully as possible as she puts the box into her backpack. If she runs for an extra half hour tonight, it will be like nothing happened. She can give the truffles to her mum so they’re not wasted; tell her she already had a box herself. Later, Lucy and Jack are in the playroom watching Teletubbies while Nina makes dinner for the family. ‘Tinkywinky, Tinkywinky … Dipsy, Dipsy … Laalaa, Laalaa … Po, Po!’ Lucy sees some truffle melted under her fingernail and absentmindedly runs it along the edge of her front tooth, then licks it away slowly. It’s delicious. 63

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Drawings These drawings were presented in the solo exhibition Where Sugar Lives at Laurel Doody Gallery, Los Angeles, December 2015 to January 2016. All works coloured pencil on paper, reproduced here courtesy of the artist and Hopkinson Mossman. Photography by Alex North.

1. The Town Wristwatch, 2014, 420 x 594 mm. 2. Where Sugar Lives, 2015, 420 x 594 mm. 3. Many Happy Returns, 2015, 420 x 594 mm. 4. Surreal Keyboard, 2015, 594 x 420 mm. 5. The Invention of BANANAGRAMS, 2015, 594 x 420 mm. 6. Allergies Survey, 2015, four parts, 420 x 850 mm overall. 7. Toothbrush Cycle, 2015, four parts, 1070 x 1070 mm overall. 8. Secondary Submarine Studies, 2015, diptych, each part 594 x 420 mm. 9. Title Page, 2015, 420 x 594 mm.

HEIDI NORTH-BAILEY

The Lynch Mob I live in a blur of momentum. Stopping only when stopped. So far, that’s only been brief moments, flashes of illnesses, brief physical exhaustion. Give me a good night’s sleep and I’m right again. Even when resting I’m moving, yoga my preferred form of meditation, walking my stillness, and dancing my place of calm. I’ve never stopped, point blank, for myself; instead I’m the tuning fork that holds its note while around me others waver. Very often, I’m the only one left standing. But it turns out I’m not immune. Lynch Syndrome, or Hereditary Nonpolyposis Colorectal Neoplasms, is something I heard of only a few months ago, but already it’s caterwauling around my body, hauling its clanging cart of baggage. I find myself sitting in drab waiting rooms for medical procedures I’d never given a second thought before. I take my clothes off in strange rooms crammed with machinery and screens, eat only white foods and fast for a day, lie down on thin beds covered in plastic sheets and watch the gauzy pastel-checked curtains drift while the drugs take effect, let professionals with cold fingers and thin-gloved hands poke and prod me. Ultrasound. Colonoscopy. CT Scan. Blood tests. And this is only the beginning. In the thin handbook I read: Lynch Syndrome is an inherited disorder that increases the risk of many types of cancer, particularly cancers of the colon and rectum (collectively, colorectal cancer). People with Lynch Syndrome also have an increased risk of cancers of the stomach, small intestine, liver, gallbladder ducts, upper urinary tract, brain, skin, and in women the ovaries and uterus.

Gallbladder ducts, which bring to mind smooth ducks’ beaks pecking over some thrown bread. Colorectal, which makes me think of a perfect correlation in maths, the steady dots climbing neatly up a graph. You know where you are

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with maths; with Lynch syndrome, also known as the wild, mismatched, spelling mistake gene, you do not. And the most chilling new word for me is neoplasms—abnormal and uncontrolled cell growth. Lynch Syndrome is aptly named. It brings to mind a lynch mob, ragtag ragamuffins running along behind me with fists raised—‘I’ll get you, you pathetic pack of genes all following the rules, while you’re off diligently performing your tasks complacently—don’t forget me, I’m here, secret and conniving. I’m swirling, darting and diving, I’m multiplying! I’m amazing! Look at everything secret and duplicitous I can do. Oh, you don’t like that? But look, look how clever and cunning I am! I’m the cleverest of the pack, and I’ll get you. Oh yes, I’ll get you. It’s only a matter of time.’ From my mother I inherited my build and height, foot size, a certain way we have of fluttering our hands when we talk, and this. She’s been chased by the lynch mob too. It caught her. Cancer of the uterus and ovaries at age 43. She was given a less than 40 per cent survival rate. The tumour they extracted from her was the size of a football. But she survived. With grit and determination she hauled herself through the treatment. Her worry subsided; at the five-year mark they told her she didn’t need to come back for testing; at 10 years cancer seemed a lifetime ago. But Lynch Syndrome is clever. It waits till you’re not looking. Then bam. Fifteen years later it hit her with bowel cancer, which would have socked her for six if she hadn’t had a colonoscopy, against her better judgement—she felt fine and had no symptoms, but her dying sister insisted. The medics probed a little deeper, and found the Lynch Mob waiting, waving their welcome banners and doing a little cha-cha. ‘Surprise! We’re here to paaaar-tay!’ For a patient who is diagnosed with Lynch Syndrome the statistics are not kind—40 per cent will have developed bowel cancer by the age of 40. That risk shoots up to 80 per cent by age 60 (compared to a normal population risk of 5.5 per cent). Worse, the risk of any children inheriting the syndrome is 50 per cent. My mother’s mother died with excruciating slowness, at 53, after having cancer for 10 years. Of course they didn’t know she had Lynch’s then. They didn’t think to warn the children. Knowledge is power. But is it? I might get cancer. It hangs in the balance. 74

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When I think of my body, healthy now, but harbouring this secret, flashy rogue, this mutatious, wicked gene, the panic of what ifs is a sort of blindness. And I don’t know what to do. I can’t control this. I can’t magic it away. I can’t fix it like my uncle has tried to, with a lifelong obsession with radical procedures and desperate eating habits. I just have to accept it, and the medical procedures that will dot my life. I have to accept that this slippery, trickster gene—rocking around in my body, doing all manner of secret business—is a part of who I am. And I’ll never quite see its face, search as I might the dark corridors of my body. But one day, inevitably, one fine and terrible day, it may reveal itself, casual and cool as a cucumber, flashing its razzle dazzle at me and sipping a margarita. ‘Oh hi. I redecorated the joint while you weren’t looking.’ And then I will look it in the eye. And I will hold my note.

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JENNY POWELL

Ballad of the Pink Roids Invisible in an after-life of elderly worlds, reference librarian searches the stacks for Concrete Grady’s Holy Life and Death fading on a yellowed skin, and a copy of the Band Rotunda play. I wait in the quiet of thought, mind’s eye stares at threads of clouds stitching the sky in crossroad shapes. Direction of dreams lost in the harsh blues of daytime filigree. Flop of highlighter pink on the seat, feet on the mat, bag on the desk. ‘Your roids, your roids,’ she begins to shout, ‘Have you had yours out?’ Her plump fingers pat her ample throat. ‘Are they here, in here?’ her volume rises. Synchronised eyes lift from books, all heads turn to the reference desk. ‘Shush, be quiet,’ the chorus imparts. Pink’s lip sinks, piercings pout. ‘Your roid glands, have you had them out?’ Conned by constant conversation I think I’ve solved it: ‘Your thyroid gland, is that what you mean?’ ‘No not.’ She starts to stamp her feet. 76

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‘You get ice cream and jelly.’ It’s easy now. ‘Tonsils? Adenoids?’ ‘No, no not. Do you have to take pills?’ ‘You could probably find that out in a book. All you have to do is look.’ The lift has risen from the depths, librarian tenderly cradles my copies. ‘I see the band’s begun to play,’ she notes and nods. ‘Our Rosie is a cross we share.’ Quietness follows the issue of books. Out on the street, words visible in light rise from the page, eyes lift to the sky and I follow the single line of a high lit cloud.

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Dressing the Dead So heavy the death so light the coffin white your whiter body head heavier on wither, that swollen globe grotesque if you weren’t mine my last We wash you in sunlight soap, comb locks over those dear little ears, struggle with stiff arms into christening dress gasp as we lift and air inhales, I almost drop you dear god, giggle and tears drop on cloth on calico shroud I lay you out with Clothilde lost within the coffin fashioned by the carpenter kind Mr Cambridge, not like the gin box for some no satin lining as for Francis, though kiss your cold lips no struggle now boy my darling Louis

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See how the men, take you, Ryan and Bladier walk from Monte Christo, and Daddy behind, folded in grim black gloved. So many come, solemn by foot or mount bury thee at the cemetery. We mothers are bid stay behind helpless in the weep.

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ELSPETH SANDYS

From Casting Off, a forthcoming memoir We move at the end of April. The plan is to arrive with as little fanfare as possible. I may not know much about village life, but I know enough to realise this is a different world we are entering. Though I don’t know this yet, most of the inhabitants can trace their families back to the Civil War. From Day One we are known as ‘interlopers’, a term applied—so one particularly taciturn villager informs me—to anyone who hasn’t lived in the village since the 1640s. ‘Been here since Adam played fullback for the Israelites,’ he informed me during that somewhat one-sided conversation. ‘You’ve been here two seconds. Let’s see how long you last.’ Sending the children to the village school helps. Children are exempt from the derogatory label. But it will be several years before I feel entitled to call myself a villager. By that time the tribe of ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ acquired by the children will, in the cautious way of country folk, have become, if not friends, then at least on first-name terms: Celia, who lives opposite, a crippled woman of mysterious parentage, who will find her way into my fiction and my heart; Roly (son of gypsies) and Heather (the village postie), who become and have remained friends; Richard (the local builder) and Ann, whose daughter Sally becomes my daughter’s best friend; Hazel, the postmistress, whose wartime stories I lap up like a cat with cream; Willie, the ex German POW, married to a girl he met while working as a prisoner on a local farm, with a German/West Country accent that renders him virtually unintelligible; Bertha, who helps me in the house and becomes a friend, sharing things only mothers of sons can share; Frank, who works for Lord Rotherwick’s Cornbury Estate, the largest private landholding in the district, and another place that will end up in my fiction; Denis and Dot—Dot’s pickled eggs are a village speciality— who run the local pub … Getting to know the middle and upper classes proves less straightforward. A week or so after we arrive I’m visited by Mrs W, the Lady of the Manor. Actually there are three manor-size dwellings in the village, but Mrs W, whose 80

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tenure of her particular manor house goes back only three decades— something I will learn soon after our first meeting—is the one who gets invited to open the village fêtes. No interloper accusations for her, apparently. Or for her husband, a sad sack of a man who seldom raises his voice above a whisper. When Mrs W appears I’m up a ladder at the front of the house, pruning the wisteria that trails delightfully, but rather too enthusiastically, over our kitchen window. ‘Good morning!’ she calls out. ‘I’m Mrs W. I’ve come to invite you and your husband to the annual Tory Garden Party. It’s on Sunday at the Manor. We always hold it in the spring. So many people disappear in the summer.’ Clutching my secateurs, I make my way down the ladder. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I say. ‘But we’re not Tories.’ Mrs W, whose head is wrapped, Queen Elizabeth style, in a floral scarf, makes a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘Oh dear,’ she sighs. ‘I assumed … I’m told you own your house. Perhaps I was misinformed.’ ‘We own most of it,’ I answer. ‘The bank owns the rest.’ She sighs again. ‘I was just saying to my husband this morning, we’re losing far too many people to the Liberals.’ ‘Actually we’re not Liberals.’ The answer to that is a frown, and a quick shake of the head, as if to check her ears haven’t deceived her. Then she says, ‘Well, there’s no denying there’s a lot to be said for the Communists. Good day to you.’ I watch her climb into her Land Rover and roar off down the street. So now we’re not just interlopers, we’re communists. I laugh, but can’t suppress a flicker of anxiety. Have I made an enemy? In the months that follow, Mrs W greets me with every sign of civility whenever our paths cross, on one occasion mentioning that she has heard there is a communist peer in the House of Lords. I try to tell her I’m not a communist, but a supporter of the British Labour Party, but she brushes my words aside. So I tell her I know the notorious Red Peer—his name is Wogan Phillips, and he was once married to Rosamund Lehmann, whose novels I am currently adapting. She shakes her head. Clearly the name means nothing to her. For a moment I’m tempted, since she seems determined to cast me as the Village Red, to tell her about my communist cousin, Rewi Alley … 81

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The Red label will stick, not just to me, but to my neighbours in the adjoining ends of the Long House. Phoebe, whose Rodean vowels and haughty manner belie her politics, spent much of her youth living in a leftwing commune. She would like to live communally with us. There’s a blocked-up door between her studio and our front room. Dissuading her from unblocking it almost scuppers our growing friendship. But then living communally would have destroyed it altogether. On the other side are Robin and Jessica, both architects, who will become close friends. Jessica’s father was a prominent member of the British Communist party, though I’m not sure how many of our fellow villagers know that. But there’s no doubt the Long House is seen by many as a communist cell. When, some years after our arrival, we buy a Lada, Roly, who lives two doors away, catching me with my head under the bonnet, calls out, ‘Talking to Moscow, are you?’ No wonder I find so few supporters when I come to set up a local branch of the Labour Party. Feudal law still applies here. Frank, who works for Lord Rotherwick, is not the only villager living in a cottage ‘tied’ to the Cornbury Estate. Voting against the interests of the landowner, even in a secret ballot, is tempting fate.

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MICHAEL STEVEN

Neilson Street It’s nearly always still dark when he threads the chain of the roller door through his hands, and as that steel door shirks and shudders and shrieks as it rolls up, he will most certainly be wearing his red waist-cut woollen Swanndri, the one that used to smell of cigarettes and the sea. When the roller door makes its final revolution around the steel pole, graunching into place, while impressions from the cold iron chain links were still laddered dents across his palms, my father, most certainly, with the gentle light of dawn suffusing the asphalt yard before us with a newness, would take a packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his red Swanndri. My father, standing with his back to me, tamping against the gold packet, the cigarette he will soon light. Deep in reverie: what is it he was contemplating? Was it the way the dew settling again on the windows of his ute would glisten like broken particles of iridium? Or was it the sad piles of spent cardboard tubes, around which were once wrapped the vinyl and fabrics

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the upholsterers named Mark and Terry, who sported mullets and wore black jeans and flannel shirts, used to cover couches and chairs and car interiors? As he stood there, my father, with his back to me, was he watching the breasts of a woman named Sandy the blonde my mother insists he had an affair with moving beneath her apron as she bent and lifted a tray of bread at the lunch bar across the driveway, while I waited among the wrecks inside his workshop? Is it too late to ask him if he was looking at the metal halide street lamps, craned in vigil-like haloed icons over the nights of Neilson Street? Did my father stare past the wire lattice fence of the freight yards, into the stacks of battered grey and green containers? Instead of reading an impenetrable lexicon, did the names of mysterious ports ring in his mind like fragments from ancient poems or koans? When the sun rose above the corrugated iron factories and Kenworth trucks with trailers arrived at the freight yard and men wearing blue overalls who worked as upholsterers, car wreckers, mechanics, panelbeaters, spray-painters, auto-electricians, scrap dealers, forklift operators, lined up to buy pies and ham sandwiches, cold cans of soft drink and cigarettes from Sandy’s lunch bar, did my father wonder if I, too, standing behind him, was sharing the very same reverie?

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Rata Terrace Always Paul and Richard, Richard and Paul. This time, though, Mr Cormack had insisted on threes and they found themselves with Jane Finnegan, matching capitals to points on a map. It was the type of job Paul loved. ‘Tokyo,’ he said right away, leaning over the paper. Jane wasn’t impressed. She ignored the map and instead launched into a story about her father’s war with the ‘Bible bashers’ down the road. ‘He said if they came back he’d smash their heads together.’ She was a pale girl with a permanent globe of green snot in one nostril, a resident of Rata Terrace, which everyone knew meant state houses. Richard seemed amused by the story. Paul imagined Jane’s father. He would be tall, bearded like a Viking. He wore steel-capped boots—Jane must have mentioned them once. Another story described him drowning a bag of kittens. He would be at home in Rata Terrace, a dangerous place of ruthless men. Paul had never been, but knew he and his mother were lucky not to live there, to have help every so often from Nanna and Poppa. And then it happened. There was a hiss of fabric, a sudden coolness around his legs. ‘Ha,’ Jane said. ‘Downtrou.’ It was. His trackpants were at his ankles. The whole class had sight of his undies. He pulled his pants up, and turned to see Jesse Dane backing away, smiling coolly to himself. There was laughter everywhere. Others had taken up the shout. ‘Downtrou! Downtrou!’ Jane cackled. Even Richard smirked. * Sometimes at lunch they joined a soccer game. These began spontaneously, matches that went on for days, played like battles by mismatched sides on a muddy field. In the absence of a game, they wandered. The two of them 85

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traipsing up and down the avenue of silver birches at the back of the back field, talking about the events of the morning, last night’s TV and things they’d heard their parents say. Or, more accurately, things Richard had heard his parents say. Paul was careful not to share too much of his and his mother’s home life, sure it wouldn’t compare well to Richard’s anecdotes of family holidays, computer games and his father’s cricket coaching. He hadn’t forgotten the lesson of the Indian restaurant, one that had come early in their friendship. It was when his mother came to pick him up from only his second visit to Richard’s that she raised it with Mrs Mikelson. ‘I have to ask you, what was the name of that Indian restaurant you went to?’ ‘Indian restaurant?’ Mrs Mikelson said. ‘Paul has been telling me and telling me we needed to go to this place he’d heard all about from Richard. We don’t go out much, but I won’t hear the end of it unless we try.’ ‘Oh, I’d forgotten about that. What was that called? I didn’t realise Richard had enjoyed it that much.’ As they talked, Richard looked curiously at both Paul and his mother, and Paul knew then that the restaurant hadn’t been as remarkable as he’d understood, that it had been overtaken in Richard’s world by many things since. His face burned as his mother revealed how closely he’d listened. He would get angry, yell at her once they got back to the car, he decided. But when that time came he wasn’t confident she’d understand and he sulked instead. On this day, the downtrou was the inevitable subject. ‘Jesse really got you,’ Richard said. ‘You didn’t even hear him coming.’ ‘Hmm.’ Paul knew better than to show embarrassment, but what was the right emotion? Should he want revenge? ‘He got Simon, too. He’s really good at it.’ ‘He’s got lots of people,’ Paul said, happy to hear of other victims. ‘He might try to get you.’ ‘I’d kick him.’ Richard flicked his leg back to demonstrate. ‘Get him as he’s crouching down.’ ‘If you see him first.’ ‘I’ll see him.’ * 86

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They both agreed that Mr Cormack was a good teacher. Unlike Mr Owen, he didn’t mind a bit of chatter while they worked, and he had once brought in his clarinet and played them all the theme from M*A*S*H. But none of that had prevented Paul from hating the man the minute he chalked an equation on the board. ‘Just to refresh,’ Mr Cormack said. ‘You should all be able to do these now.’ It was the worst thing he could have said, guaranteeing an hour of struggle. All chants of the times tables had Paul lost after the fives. He still needed his fingers to add and subtract. And those figures on the board were division, the hardest of all, a knot that only tightened no matter how much he pulled. He started neatly, each number contained in its square, hopeful this would lead to answers that were just as precise and certain. But this didn’t last; it couldn’t last. Soon he was reeling, yet again, from a dog-eared page of bluntpencilled workings. Trying to smooth out the corners only curled them more and smudged the pencil into a grey, answerless mess. He tried to peek at Richard’s, but he held his book on such a slant that Paul couldn’t make anything out and now it was too late. Mr Cormack had begun to ask them for answers. Tessa, Simon, even Jim gave right answers. He asked Richard one and he answered quickly. Maths hadn’t been his struggle since he began visiting Learning Works, a tuition centre with a mortar board-wearing bear as mascot. There all the difficulty had been melted away by computer puzzles and bright textbooks with stickers for each page. Paul had asked his mother for tuition too, and one evening, after dinner, a man arrived in a Datsun that was in even worse shape than their own. A student. He brought bad breath and a textbook from the library, pointing out the remainders with a dirty fingernail. ‘Paul,’ Mr Cormack said. ‘What did you get for this one?’ ‘Ah.’ He looked closely at that messy book even though the answer wasn’t there. ‘That one …’ Mr Cormack had been poised at the board, chalk in hand, and just as he went to turn, to see the delay for himself, Richard slid his book towards Paul. ‘487,’ Paul said. ‘Good work.’ He added it to the board. ‘Terry, number seven?’ Paul sat back, waiting for someone to be wrong. A spectator again, except that Jesse Dane stared at him from the row opposite, his dirty face blank. 87

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* The next day there was rumour of a game at lunch. They scoffed their sandwiches and Paul hurried back to the cloakroom to stow his sweatshirt. His mother liked to remind him that he had once lost one out on the field. Stuffing it into his backpack, he felt something cool and smooth in there—an apple, the skin studded with squashed crumbs and lint. ‘Come on,’ Richard said. Mr Cormack came walking out of the classroom, his hands in his pockets. ‘Keeps the doctor away,’ he said, winking at Paul. He strolled on past them both, heading for the staffroom. ‘The game will be starting,’ Richard said. Paul rubbed the apple on his chest and went to follow. But Jesse was there now, standing in the cloakroom entrance. ‘Hey Paul,’ he said. Richard stood back against a wall, looking at Jesse uncertainly. Jesse walked to Paul. He shoved him. The apple dropped and rolled out to the middle of the room. Paul felt a coat hook jab his back. He smelt the rubbery smell of rain jackets and he pushed himself out of them to stand up straight again. Jesse shoved him a second time. Not as hard, just a push on one shoulder. He did it again. Paul said, ‘What?’ But otherwise did nothing. He let himself be pushed again, and again. Richard was still at the back of the cloakroom, still uncertain. And others had gathered now. All watching quietly with their mouths open. ‘He’s crying,’ someone—Jane Finnegan—said. Not mocking, but as if to say stop, you’ve done enough already. Jesse gave him one more push and then walked away. Richard went to Paul. ‘Are you okay?’ he said quietly. ‘You didn’t run away or anything.’ * Paul and his mother ate watching the news, and after gobbling his sausage— usually he saved it for last—he just sat, letting his mashed potatoes go cold and claylike. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ his mother said during an ad break.

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‘What?’ ‘Your eyes. Have you been crying?’ ‘No. It’s the kitchen, it’s smoky. Couldn’t you open a window when you fry stuff ?’ He was right. The kitchen was small, opening into the lounge, and fried food smells filled both rooms. Even tomorrow, he knew, he would still recognise the whiff of sausages in his clothes. * It was later in the week that Mr Cormack talked to him. While the rest of the class worked, he asked Paul but also Simon Connell out to the cloakroom. Standing there among the bags and coats again, Paul’s throat went dry. He would need to describe it all, his falling over and Jesse looking at him while he got up from the floor, ready to push him again. ‘Simon told me that Jesse did something to you,’ Mr Cormack said. Paul immediately regretted ever thinking of Simon as a fusspot. He saw then that he had been wrong to be annoyed with his insistence on offside rules or bored by his suggestion that they form a class council and vote for each other. He was a friend after all. For a second, he thought he might cry. ‘He kept pushing me,’ he said, his eyes on the lino. ‘Over and over again.’ ‘When was this?’ Mr Cormack said. ‘Simon?’ ‘No, no,’ Simon said. ‘It was during geography. He downtroued Paul then and he got me that morning. And he’s done it again. You can’t even walk around without thinking he might get you.’ ‘Yeah,’ Paul said slowly, realising his mistake. ‘Well, I’ll talk to him. But what was this other thing, the pushing?’ ‘Nothing.’ Mr Cormack frowned. Paul couldn’t take those words back. ‘Just a game,’ he said. Mr Cormack looked hard at them both. Simon nodded, satisfied. Paul showed no expression. ‘Okay,’ Mr Cormack said. ‘Well, you tell me if there’s anything else.’ * He never asked again, and on the odd occasion Richard mentioned the pushing, Paul pretended not to hear. It was as if it had never happened. Jesse

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treated Paul as a stranger, rarely looking his way, and if he did, he avoided making eye contact. And while the downtrouing did continue for another two weeks, it was Jim Preece who kept it going and who also brought it to its sudden end when he grabbed too much of Simon’s pants and gave half the class a flash of diddle. Jim was mysteriously absent that afternoon, the unnamed subject of Mr Cormack’s long talk about inappropriate behaviour. With all that over, the usual routines trundled on. Warmer weather brought talk of cricket instead of soccer, but also tag, and Paul and Richard joined three others in playing that obsessively over each lunch, morning and afternoon break. They sprinted around the back field, desperate never to be ‘it’, and returned to class with their hearts still pounding. In maths, they began fractions. A new topic, so that for a short time, Paul was no worse than anyone else. He even grasped some of the rules, at least enough to see why his answers were wrong. But this understanding came just as Mr Cormack decided it was time to move on to harder questions, and he floundered with those before becoming lost completely when they moved on again. * Waking on a Saturday morning, he immediately felt the relief of a day without maths. He ate his toast in front of  What Now?, basking in those school-free hours. The feeling could only last so long. By afternoon he thought of tag and wondered how Richard was spending the day. He kicked a ball at the garage door and when his mother came out to collect washing off the line he asked her if they might go to the library. ‘Again?’ she said. ‘It’ll be closing soon. And anyway, I was going to see about a heater that was in the Trade and Exchange.’ He kicked the ball again, harder so it made a satisfying boom on the door. ‘Maybe I’ll come too then.’ ‘Well, you can’t stay here. I’ll have the police at me if I leave you home.’ * It was a grey day and the river looked dirty, slowly flowing under the willows. They wound their way along its banks in their Datsun before crossing over into unfamiliar suburbs. They turned into a street of weatherboard houses, each spare and barnlike on blank squares of grass. 90

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‘Look out for number 52,’ Paul’s mother said, slowing the car. And as they passed house after house, he glimpsed a street sign. Rata Terrace. ‘Is this the right street?’ ‘Of course it is. What number are you up to on your side?’ Now every house was Jane Finnegan’s. At any minute he would see a bearded man dragging a sack of kittens. ‘Here it is,’ his mother said, and they pulled into the driveway of one of the weatherboard houses. Two cars rusted on the grass in the yard of the house next door, their windows clouded with cobwebs. That had to be the Finnegans’. An older woman came to the door, wearing a man’s brown jersey. ‘I spoke to your husband about a heater,’ Paul’s mother said. ‘Yes, yes. Come in.’ They stepped into a lounge of mismatched furniture like their own, except that the house was pungent with cat, laundry and cooking smells, and in the corner, slouched in an armchair, was Jesse Dane. He nodded at them both. He wore what Paul now realised he only ever wore, a grubby red sweatshirt. ‘Jesse,’ the woman said, ‘go get that heater.’ He slid off the chair and slunk away. ‘He must be your age,’ Paul’s mother said. ‘He’s at school,’ Paul muttered. ‘At Brackston? Why didn’t you say?’ ‘That bloody school,’ Jesse’s mother said, too loudly for that small room. ‘Always wanting money for trips or books or some other bloody thing.’ Jesse came back dragging a column heater. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello to your friend?’ Paul’s mother said. ‘Hi,’ Paul said. ‘Hi,’ Jesse said. He quickly looked at Paul before taking back his place in the corner. ‘Yes,’ Paul’s mother said, remembering something as she looked at the heater. ‘There was that farm visit the other month. Why they needed so much just to look around some farm I don’t know.’ ‘Who are all these trips for?’ Jesse’s mother said. ‘That’s what I want to know. It’s keeping these teachers happy, not the kiddies.’ And she launched into a long complaint about the items on the stationery list that year, the need for specific exercise books, and her efforts to find cheaper alternatives. After 91

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what seemed like half an hour, she came to her conclusion: ‘And I don’t think he even uses half of them.’ It was at that point that Paul’s mother could bring the subject back to the heater, hand over the money so they could get away. He looked at her hard, willing her to do this, while knowing she wouldn’t. There was no boring conversation she wouldn’t prolong, no opportunity she wouldn’t take to give the speaker more to go on. ‘Oh I know,’ she said. ‘They’ll be having camps soon too, and wanting money and boots and all sorts.’ Jesse’s mother started on her eldest son’s high-school fees. She walked while talking, and disappeared into the kitchen doorway. There was the flick of a switch, and the first rumbles of the jug. ‘Cup of tea?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you two play outside for a little bit,’ Paul’s mother said. ‘Show him your cricket bat, Jesse.’ The two boys found themselves on the lawn, Paul in a panic as the door closed behind them, ready to have to defend himself there on Jesse’s home ground. ‘I’ll get the bat,’ Jesse said. .

* Jesse’s cricket bat wasn’t a Gray-Nicolls or a GM, but one of the too-light models that came packaged up with pencil-thin stumps and a rubber ball. He handed it to Paul, saying, ‘Do you know French cricket?’ Paul shook his head, even though Poppa had played it with him once. He was still wary of conversation. ‘It’s so just two people can play,’ Jesse said and he quietly explained the rules. He gently threw the ball and Paul chipped it away so that it rolled only a few short metres. ‘Good shot,’ Jesse said, running to retrieve the ball. ‘Nice,’ he said to another of Paul’s feeble taps, and he glanced at the door. Paul hit it slightly harder the next time, and when Jesse jogged away after it, he looked at the door too. He tried to transmit his anger to his mother telepathically: shut up and go, please just shut up so we can go. It didn’t work. Jesse returned for another half-hearted bowl and they played on, both concentrating hard on the game, commenting on nothing else, but also making sure they held back. Jesse threw the ball directly to the bat, and while it would have been easy for Paul to whack it far, he never did. 92

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On and on this went. Paul began to feel the need to scream, to throw the bat, anything to end it. But he didn’t, and finally it happened, the door swung open. ‘Paul, come and help me with this heater.’ He had been readying for a shot, and he let the bat fall from his hands, running over it to get to the house. He helped his mother to lift the heater over the doorstep, and guided it along the concrete path to their car. ‘You’ll get a lot of use out of that,’ Jesse’s mother said, following them. ‘We certainly will,’ Paul’s mother said. ‘There’s still some cold days left.’ Miraculously, she reached the car. ‘Bye then.’ Paul said goodbye too, speaking quietly, almost a whisper. And as he went to the car he looked to where Jesse stood, shy again, beside the dropped bat. He thought of that bat and of the living room with its bad smells, the couch split and spilling foam. So much there to remember, so much he could tell Richard when he got to school on Monday.

93

S U E W O OT TO N

Stable A whinny-wind blows through the cracks and hay-whiff hits and I remember misted morning rides on horse-wide tracks on board the felted ribcage of a breathing beast. Seed heads swashed our knees. We parted leaves. The passing world itched flesh to snort and snicker. Ears flick-flicked and swivelled: nets set to catch the pitch of tremors set off by a distant barking dog. The bite, the bit, the spit, the froth, the foam. The lips that curled back rubbery to show the sea-slug tongue, the yellow chomping bones. The mahogany eye held mine, and mine was small. The saddle was my tiny terra firma. An ocean poured beneath according to its tides and drifts, its currents, counter-currents, sway, its shifts and twitch and slip. Apple, midge, a thunder clap. It was a riding with, or it was riding braced, against. When we shared the wind for comb, when we adjusted each to each: shin to flank, eye to eye and shoe for shoe. When empty tank was hunger, rest; when mileage was a trail of steaming piles. Empty stable. Derelict. But clop-clop-clops a broken board and nickers tins and hay-whiff hits and ancestry kicks into stirrup and I (who never rode) remember— goes giddy-up my blood, my blood, my blood.

94

AIRINI BEAUTRAIS

Port Bowen The line went taut. My hand spun on the reel. No fish, all snag. I waded to the shore. On board, the wireless rasped about the war. They had me there by nights, guarding the steel that they were slowly breaking up. By feel I took my footsteps through the surf, its raw cold burning on my skin. One arm’s length more I’d have my jig, my chance to land a meal. The moon was in the cloud. Her face all pale and fuzzed, she dimmed and brightened over the hulk. And as I searched a wave crept up on me, a sudden smack. I staggered in its bulk, went under, thrashed my limbs to no avail. Come into me, I’ll have you, said the sea.

95

ELIZABETH THOMSON

Recent works 1. Blue Beginning, 2015, 1120 x 1120 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel. 2. Sentient, 2015, 1400 x 2020 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel. 3. Numinous Transitive Blue II, 2014, 1120 x 1120 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer, contoured wood panel. 4. Between Memory and Oblivion III, 2015, 500 x 500 x 50 mm. Glass spheres, optically clear resin, cast vinyl film, lacquer, contoured wood panel. 5. Between Memory and Oblivion IV, 2015, 500 x 500 x 50 mm. Glass spheres, optically clear resin, cast vinyl film, lacquer, contoured wood panel. 6. Off Indian Island, 2015, each panel 755 x 1000 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel. 7. Solaris—Study, 2015, 500 x 500 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel. 8. Sentient­—Study, 2014, each panel 500 x 500 x 50 mm. Cast vinyl film, lacquer on contoured and shaped wood panel.

The complexities and paradoxes of space and distance are concerns very much at the heart of  Thomson’s art practice. And her voyage to the Kermadec Islands in 2011 was about nothing if not the opening up of space and distance—the wide, open forever-ness of the mid-ocean. It is that dizzying, all-encompassing realm that Elizabeth Thomson’s oceanic works conjure forth—a broadening of the horizons, in every respect—and also a diving down beneath that horizon. —Gregory O’Brien

THERESE LLOYD

Wood Tiger Meets Fire Dog I woke up this morning and my inner animal had metamorphosed. It’s out now. No denying it. I’ve been awake for three hours and still no change. ‘Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it,’ says John Cage. What is to be celebrated here? My meat? My fur? I expand outward and in a fantastic trick of perspective, my internals shrink, my vitals no longer vital. If I were simply body parts, you would recognise me easy. But I have complications, post-op anomalies that bring in curious surgeons from overseas. The Rottweiler in you, the one that hangs around your neck and skin-covered thickness, makes me question the advice of parents. Touching fire is not dangerous. We know what fire does: smokes, burns, obliterates. Dogs are different. Some are kind. The only way to find out is to throw a stick for one. The dog that does not return. The dog that buries the stick. The dog that wants you to throw it again and again.

105

MARIS O’ROURKE

Scream The guy next door is slowly killing the old pōhutukawa lops off pieces each weekend crimson blossoms and green leathery leaves litter the footpath smother our feet wide-spread whānau branches gradually beaten and broken into submission remove the ‘place of leaping’ until only the mother trunk remains head bare arms empty alone against the sky I avoid her homeless gaze pretend I can’t hear her high-pitched screams above the chainsaws relentless whine step around the piles of red logs slowly bleeding on the footpath.

106

SCOTT HAMILTON

Homage to Tongan Poets 1. On this sunny morning rain falls in Talamahu maketi: last week’s storm is still a pool on the roof, draining through the rusted iron a few drops at a time.  I step past the earliest hawkers, past their undersized avocados and bootleg DVDs, and see a bleb of dirty water break on the forehead of Siua Ongosia, punake, lover of Carroll and Lear, first Tongan to rap in glottal stops, star on YouTube and at the Billfish bar, and now the first beggar to arrive at Talamahu every morning, to mount the bench that is his last stage. Yesterday Siua told me about Tennyson  and the Amazon; today he greets me like any other stranger, asking for taha, `ua pa`anga, for a smoke, for a light. His hands are scarred and dented, like the tin the avocado farmer uses to catch last week’s storm. It is taha noa, and Siua  watches the utes arrive from Kala`au and Te`ekiu, as young men in torn tupenus unload their fathers’ harvests, offering `inasi to tourists and the Nuku`alofan bourgeoisie. Their yams look like missiles; their dirty talo are landmines harvested from the ancient battlefields of Hihifo.  107

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The farmers’ boys do not talk with Siua, though they’ve all watched him on YouTube, seen him swinging from a mango tree while rhyming uaea with tractor, heard the love poem he wrote for his wife after she left their home, dragging their only suitcase around pools of kava and beer. 2. Twenty maile away, at Lapaha, the punake and their kings are silent. With toki made of stone, the tu`a cut stone from the beaches of Fafa and Pangaimotu, Niutoua and `Uvea. They shook coconut heads from the heavens, split and sipped from them, lashed coconut hair round the stones, dragged the stones to Lapaha, laid one stone on top of another. Today tour buses stop at the royal tombs. Do not talk about reverence, about fatonia. The tu`a were not offering tribute. They raised stones to keep the dead from rising, to keep the `eiki and their whips in Pulotu, to keep the mouths of the royal poets stuffed with earth.

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JESSICA LE BAS

Wanting for Nothing You want me to show you the blue lagoon and the pearly white sand, the string band You want to see the brown-eyed girls twirl, their hips swaying, playing in their bright pareu You want to wear jandals and light cotton, and a frangipani behind your ear You want to feel the heat on your pink papa`a skin You want to see the underwater world of butterfly fish, the flame-tail snapper You want to feel the soft-bellied trevally on your thigh as it swims by You want to sing in a church, rejoice, voices in accord. Praise to the lord! You want an endless summer, and another and another after that … You want to taste mangos and guava and banana and cassava and pawpaw from my garden You want to taste the creamy flesh of kuru chips fried in coconut oil You too want to buy slabs of tuna from the Punanga Nui market —fourteen dollars a kilo, if you know the lingo You will hear the drummers, the strummers, and the all-day hummers, in harmony. Kimi will be on his eight-string ukulele, the black pearl shell from Manihiki picking poems from a place no papa`a has been There will be a big ocean You will hear about long days lying on golden sands, and warm nights at the Waterline, drinking Corona—fresh limes You will eat at the Tamarind House with the High-Com, ika mata and marlin with rukau. The sky will turn crimson You will see the mamas on the rocks at Avatiu washing their yards of heavy cotton, and if you are lucky you will find them again at the church hall on the back road in Nikao, stitching yesterday’s songs into hymns 109

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On Sunday you will catch the tourist bus to a church of your liking You will have kaikai afterwards in the same meeting house they gather in the cyclone season You will eat small sandwiches like missionaries and drink RARO juice from polystyrene cups You will hear a sermon in Tongan, Cook Island Māori and French You will feel the sweat pool on your lip. It will fall from the tip of your nose to a concrete floor At night there will be crickets and dogs and sometimes cats calling Always roosters, sometimes the drums, and always the Pacific Ocean pounding on the reef You will hear the band at the community hall play the best 1970s music—and sometimes Barry Manilow You will fly home, not early, but timely Where you will buy something from that big pharmacy in the mall for your sunburn, and the mosquito bites, and the diarrhoea you swear was from the stuff you ate on Sunday You will want to get a good night’s sleep, where there are no wild dogs howling, no roosters outside your window, no squawking birds answering you back You will tell your friends however about the fish, and the 24/7 heat because it has rained at home every day since you left, and there is snow on the foothills behind your house You will tell them that a hot July sun on your white winter skin was sensuous, oh so exciting. You will lower your cleavage to show your tan mark, the blisters not yet rising You will tell them about the smell of frangipani, and the best ever burgers at The 110

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Palace by the port where you went three times You will tell them how you ate raw fish and taro leaves, and watched whales swim past the resort Their eyes will roll and their mouths will open in envy. They will say you are lucky. They will wish they could’ve gone too, had there not been so much going on right now.

111

V I C TO R I A B R O O M E

The Only Fish Dad taught me to fish. My first rod was a knitting needle with a length of wool tied on it. I wandered after Dad through the sand to surf cast off the stony beach at Amberley. I was given a cane rod when I was ten and fished by myself at the lagoon in Waikuku where boys would spear huge fat eels and I caught cockabullies and filled a jar and took them home and forgot them. I didn’t understand captivity then. One night I went by myself to where the fishermen stood in a line at the river’s mouth. I was anxious as the only child but I cast my line into the fading day and soon had a fat herring to reel in, that thrashed and twisted as I took it off the hook embarrassed at my catch. One of the men looked down and said—‘You caught the only fish tonight.’ I put it in my plastic bag and walked back to the bach through the pines, somehow shamed. Anyway it was scaled and gutted and cooked for breakfast.

112

OLIVIA MACASSEY

Small Blue Pill There is nothing like it: the hand that pushes you under. You feel it palm over your scalp, your face and bone-weight you down and down and down and holds you under. Holds you under. No surfacing in fright or confusion of fear and where am I, a fist of suddenly-remembering gathering your intestines and a throatlumpbunch. This is the wall; that must be the door. Who am I? How old am I, thirty? Forty-four? From where comes that stripe of light on the wall? All night you can lie with your face underwater, under water you know is calm and still your breathing is slow, is some huge animal and your heart is even and slow and full— it is as if you had never become you at all.

113

BRENT KININMONT

New Year Ekiden To the millions watching my nephew fade he is crimson with exertion. The TV doesn’t catch the skin melted to ruddy slugs on his face by the makeshift barbecue his older brothers once made. For now I only see in the pained looks that his lungs are no longer bellows. They are Aqaba and Eilat, twin border towns beside the Red Sea, where I once sat and watched spent cigarettes slowly rain on the sand about the tea vendor’s bare feet. While the colliding towns burned ever dimmer, dawn stretched for a moon uncommonly blanched of craters and pedalled just out of reach.

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ELIZABETH MORTON

Learning Geography, One Disaster at a Time The first time, I hid in the wardrobe with Blu-Tack in my ear sockets. The back yard was on fire. Sheets on the clothesline sparked and woofed. The mandarin tree wobbled in the heat. The vegetable patch melted into chop suey, and family cats purred ash. I was nine. The wardrobe smelled like Vicks vapours. Do you remember the hydrangea heads blazed orange? I was nine and you were five. You probably don’t remember. We were in the wardrobe anyway. Later, in Jerusalem, a wedding party collapsed. I was older. We were eating noodles and watching television. They were dancing and the floor caved in. Three storeys of a banquet hall, like a sunken cake. We found Jerusalem on Encarta, a scar upon scar tissue. That night I burned a line on my thigh with the bar heater. I called it the West Bank. When you saw it you shrugged and resumed watching Looney Tunes cartoons. Looney Tunes were the best. We learned the Big Apple in our teens. They dragged an ancient television into the biology classroom, and played the towers tumbling all day. I could never remember the difference between Meiosis and Mitosis. One airplane and then another. Everything gets split in two. The people slipped out the windows. Something about chromosomes. There were two genetically identical airplanes and two towers in anaphase. I remember it now. We learned Haiti and Tōhoku from our mattresses, scrolling our news feeds and munching Doritos. We learned the London underground, and the sulphur fields of Mosul. We learned Nairobi malls and the ramshackle hospitals of Sierra Leone. We learned Collapse in our own back yards. We knew what 7.1 felt like. We knew the Earth’s hiccups like the back of our hands. They say the first cut is the deepest. When you were five and I was nine, it was the smallest thing. Everything writhed and melted but nobody got hurt. We were in the wardrobe, anyway. You probably don’t remember. The vegetable patch melted into chop suey. The ceiling fan petals curled and dropped. Appliances stewed in their sour juices. It was the time of my life. I learned my pulse off by heart. I learned local geography. 115

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Work During the 1950s and 1960s you could walk into a factory, ask to speak to the foreman, who would look you up and down to check if you had a limb missing, and say, ‘Start tomorrow?’ No references or work record required. Thanks mainly to wool and dairy exports to Britain, the New Zealand economy was as buoyant as a newly launched ship. Reportedly, the prime minister knew the names of the handful of unemployed. In 1958 I landed my first job: with H.J. Ryan, a firm that assembled motor mowers. As it was a school holiday job, it was understood my term of employment was only a matter of a few weeks. Brief though my stay was, I hated every minute of it, the beginning of a life-long odyssey of hating work. As I was shown onto the factory floor, I was hit by a thunderous wall of sound: the noise of cold metal clanging against cold metal. My duties were loose: helping staple together cardboard boxes to package up assembled mowers, unpack boxes of parts, sweep the floor. If the foreman spotted me being idle, he would shout, ‘Look busy—the Boss is coming around!’ Whereupon I would grab the broom and sweep the already swept floor. If the foreman was to be feared, the Boss—our version of Big Brother— was an even greater figure of terror. He was like Captain Ahab in a three-piece suit. The Boss was a remote but real figure who inhabited a glass-windowed box set in the corner of the factory, a floor above us. If he looked out and saw, say, the newest and youngest employee leaning on his broom, he would give the foreman the barbed end of his tongue. For, just as the foreman could sack us, the Boss could sack the foreman. Among the young working-class males there were five main topics of conversation: driving V8 cars at over the ton (i.e. 100mph), getting drunk, having sex with young girls, making lots of easy money through scams, and having a good punchup in which you, the lead pugilist, were the victor. I had yet to learn to drive, hadn’t had my first drink, hadn’t kissed a girl, hadn’t made any easy money, and hadn’t been in any fights. So I listened with 116

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respectful awe to the feats of my fellow workers and said nothing. I was shocked on the first day to discover that instead of leaving at 3.30pm, as at school, we had another one and a half hours to go. Then we had to stand in line to clock in our attendance cards. The machine into which we inserted our cards was the world’s most accurate lie detector. Whether you were nervous or relaxed, its accuracy never faulted. It was as inexorable as the lowering blade in Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. School work was a lot more interesting than factory work. You had several teachers a day and were always learning something new. During the Christmas season of the same year I became a mail sorter. The mail sorters stood in a circle picking up items from a hopper and throwing them into bags. Our supervisor told us to look out for copies of Playboy: a ‘classy’ glossy magazine that provided ‘entertainment for men’. The magazine was illegal in New Zealand so customers had it mailed in. When our lynx-eyed supervisor discovered a copy, he extracted the magazine and flicked though to the centrefold: a fold-out with a California blonde or brunette rendered in warm apricot. Pubic hair had yet to be made legal. Everyone—women included—had a look. I didn’t let on it was my first glimpse of the unclad female form. Now, early Playboy nudes look as though they come from a Renaissance tableau: remote, serene, marginally erotic, above all posed, their haircuts masterpieces of the hairdresser’s ability to make hair look as sculpted as stone. In 1966 I became a full-time ‘seagull’: that is, a casual wharf worker. Of all the labouring jobs I did—pouring concrete (from which I was sacked), walking Gib board up stairwells of houses under construction (sacked), hand-trucking fruit and vegetables at Turners & Growers (sacked), cleaning office blocks (sacked), working in a motorcar assembly factory (sacked), packing dry goods into railway wagons (so easy, no one ever got sacked), stacking frozen butter at the freezing works (not sacked), stacking hot loaves of bread (quit)—seagulling on the wharf was my favourite. It was well paid, and a bonus would come through about six weeks later. The work was varied. Often the ships changed daily, the company was good (many were drinking buddies from the Kiwi Hotel), and ships, even moored at a wharf, have a salty romance. This was the pre-container era, when cargo was unloaded manually by 117

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gangs of twelve: twelve on the shore loading the cargo into sheds, and twelve in the hold of the ship. It was more exotic to work in the hold but the shore gang had the easier time. They had to wait until the hatch covers were removed and cargo swung ashore before they began work. When smoko came, the shore crew got a head start towards the cafeteria. Smaller ships had hatch covers consisting of sturdy steel-tipped planks, removed manually one at a time by two men. Good nerves were needed to remove these planks, as one slip could mean dropping twenty feet into a darkened hold. Larger ships had multi-hinged plates, pulled off by the ship’s winch. Cargo was loaded onto pallets, wrapped in chains or placed in a spider’s nest mesh of ropes. If the gang of seagulls was inexperienced, the hatchie would aggressively shout instructions: ‘Four eyes! Put the ropes around the bales! Not like that! Around the bottom!’  If you were aboard the ship working the hold, six of the twelve would normally unload, while the other six would rest. This was known as an ‘up’. You could sit in the hold or on the ship’s deck doing nothing for about two hours. Unlike factories, you didn’t have to pretend to be busy. It was okay to read. So on a typical ‘up’ I might be sitting in warm sunshine on the deck of a romantically rusty cargo ship reading Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller: basking in its rich tumble of language, while waiting my turn down in the hold. Getting paid to read! Occasionally, news of these ‘ups’ would reach public ears and people would get excited about loafing wharfies, though nothing ever changed. Rumour had it that permanent wharfies had their ‘ups’ so well organised, they could take whole days off and be paid. A properly equipped wharfie or seagull carried a wool hook and warm clothing. Wool was tightly packed into large bales weighing seven hundred pounds, their smooth compact shape making a hand hold impossible. With a wool hook, the bales could be manoeuvred into place for hoisting by ropes. Warm gear was needed while working in a freezer unloading butter or meat. The wharf was a dangerous place to work. Once, when I was in the foreward hold of the Athenic unloading butter and the loaded tray accidentally grazed the side of the hold, six blocks of iron-hard frozen butter came hurtling down. Everyone scattered except a large Māori man who was hit on the back of the neck. He went down like a rookie heavyweight punched by Muhammad Ali. We all clambered over the floor of frozen butter to see if he was okay. 118

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Miraculously, he was. One of the nastiest bits of cargo were oxygen cylinders, secured with chains. As the hook tightens the pressure on the chains, the horizontally stacked cylinders snap together viciously. If your fingers were in the way they would be crushed. And sure enough I did accidentally get my hand crushed, though it was by wooden boxes not steel oxygen tanks. I left my left hand under one of the wires attached to a tray. As the pressure of the hook tightened the wires I was yanked off my feet, suspended by one hand. Actually, just one finger. I screamed and the crane loosened, letting me fall. My third finger was crushed but not too badly: an x-ray revealed nothing broken. Walking a ship’s length when several hatches were being simultaneously unloaded was particularly hazardous. Hard hats were not yet in use and workers would be killed from time to time. With the arrival of container shipping in the 70s, the days of ‘ups’ and casually employed seagulls ended. By now I had been sacked numerous times. Adapting the words of Ferdishenko in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, I should have told any prospective employer: ‘I must advise you not to employ me. Particularly if you are a factory owner.’ Factories were boredom incarnate and I had great difficulty in dealing with the sense of futile elongation of time induced by repetitive work, so different from the pleasurable delay of time induced by marijuana. When I discussed this factory boredom with fellow workers, they said, ‘You just switch off.’ How do you switch off ? I was always switched on. I only lasted a day in a bakery. As the bread emerged oven-hot on a slowly moving conveyor belt, my challenging task was to grasp two loaves of bread together, one non-gloved hand on each side, and place them on trays. Training time for this job? About ten seconds. ‘They don’t feel so hot if you grasp them more firmly,’ said Phil, my fellow worker. I tried his advice and found the bread felt even hotter. I dropped the hot loaves and the conveyor relentlessly continued until bread loaves began falling off the end of the belt onto the floor in a mini hot-bread avalanche. Phil told me he liked the job because you could work different hours. How anyone could like this job was beyond my imagining. I quit. It was the first time I quit on the same day I started. It felt like a liberation. I hadn’t been sacked by the foreman or the Boss: I had sacked myself. 119

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In 1971 I reprised my factory boredom in the mail-sorting centre of the Sydney Post Office. Unlike the factory jobs I had endured in the 60s, I found some soulmates: Peter Sweet (who wanted to be a writer); Harry Cording (who had already published some science fiction!); ‘John Lennon’ (not the famous Beatle but an English guy who looked exactly like him); Frank ‘The Beard’ Lacey (who made off with a wooden Garuda bird sculpture that I had bargained for over a two-hour dinner in Indonesia); and several others cut from a similar cloth. What we all had in common was long hair, dopesmoking, LSD-sampling, and being in our twenties, secure in the knowledge that this task of sorting mail was a temporary stop-gap in a life that had yet to find a firm direction. Frank said we were all failures. Significantly, three of us wanted to be writers. * Life had taught me that I had an attitude problem to work and that work had a seriously bad attitude towards me. Like a bad marriage, it was a case of mutual incompatibility. As a trial run, I had been on the dole for three weeks back in 1967, just as wool prices fell. By 1976 the Department of Social Welfare decided that those receiving an unemployment benefit had to earn it by constantly applying for jobs. Since I was trying to avoid work in order to write, this was a nuisance. At one office I visited, a prospective employer refused to sign the form affirming that I had applied for a job. His logic? He had not advertised a vacancy so how could I have applied for a job where none existed? In the early 80s I was one of a group of six artists (poets, songwriters, musicians) who lived in two neighbouring Freemans Bay houses, all busily beavering away at their muse while occasionally moonlighting: doing underthe-table work for cash. It was possible at the time to hold a job under a phony name and draw the dole, though I preferred to use the time available to write. Sometimes I had zero cash and took a strange masochistic satisfaction in my poverty. It proved the seriousness of my resolve to be a writer. I wrote several books while on the dole. However, three to six hours of writing was as much as I could manage and I spent at least four hours a day watching television. Days on the dole can be long. During a spell on the dole in the early 80s I would sleep late and have the most extraordinarily vivid dreams. I transmogrified these dreams into poems and considered calling the

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book Dreams on the Dole. However, I wound up calling it simply Dreams because the longer title seemed too sociologically programmatic. The employed might well wonder how the unemployed spend their time. Some of the myths are true: the unemployed tend to stay up late and sleep in late. They do things in a leisurely rather than a hurried way. They may spend hours talking to other dole recipients. The dole is a bad thing for a young person aged below twenty and arguably anyone below twenty-five. Being on the dole can mean a lot of time spent at home because going out always seems to cost money. The challenge of unemployment is to face the challenge of being an artist before you have ‘made it’. And of course you may never make it. Your life may be permanently poor. Without aspiration or clear purpose, being unemployed becomes a B-grade way of passing the time, which seems to stretch out like an endless desert. This feeling can shift to depression with alarming ease. Norman Mailer once wrote, ‘Boredom slays more of existence than war.’ The boredom of unemployment is the product of an affluent society, for it is only such societies that grant the privilege of a benefit. Without the dole or similar benefits, life would be more ‘real’ but more desperate. Similarly, the provision of a universal old-age benefit in New Zealand on turning sixty-five means the less-than-successful may be cold in winter, but they won’t starve.

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Abraham and Isaac I was up well before night left the hut to draw water and light our Primus stove to make tea before waking the boy. Let him sleep in a little, I thought. Breakfast done we put on camouflage and prepared the rifles. I tidied up, gave the boy forty-five minutes’ head start but I caught him in a patch of bush three clicks downstream. Crouched there, he looked just like a white-tailed deer; how still he twitched and sniffed the air to pick a scent that I imagined antlers either side of his close-cropped head. I raised my rifle. With the deer in my sights I waited for a voice to tell me when to squeeze the trigger.

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Stepfather No. 2 I was broken, when I first saw your face little-girl-veteran, who’d lost the wooden-spoon-war too angry and bitter to love you then, in any case it was easier to love strange boys on the chase than risk another man breaking my heart’s law I was broken, when I first saw your face never realised why He gave me the middle name Grace till it was too late, too raw, too sore too angry and bitter to love you then, in any case easier to disappear without a trace jumped out the window, forgot the door I was broken, when I first saw your face had no idea, didn’t care, about sense of place on the street, there is only one law too angry and bitter to love you then, in any case but perhaps that was the point, of my efface to break my core and lose the war in the search for more I was broken, when I first saw your face too angry and bitter to love you then, in any case

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T-ball Wars The junior squad sit along the bottom of the bank watching in shell shock Sammy, their best troop carried off the diamond field on a litter made from mummies’ and daddies’ arms. The captain scratches her flat nose touches the tongue of her cap like she’s seen her older brother do. She huffs deeply slow, surrenders again to Saturday morning conscript. Her superstar sibling— ‘Smash-It Siaki’— gives an upward nod and flutters his fingers along his arm from the sideline. Her eyebrows furrow at the hand-signal orders. She picks up her wooden weapon, marches to enemy lines. Her eyes scan the territory: bases loaded. infield infantry 124

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crouched and armed with hollowed gloves, outfield cavalry ready to charge at big hits. She knows the drill: swings the bat side to side bounces from her knees loosens her shoulders bends her wrists. Her comrades chant her name and their team colours. Whoosh … whoosh … whoosh! Her helmet bounces off the turf. Another casualty.

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Holes Outside, the grey street was empty, clouds sulking in the sky. On a fine day there’d be kids on scooters and bikes, babies in prams, adults walking with a takeaway coffee cup in one hand, a dog leash in the other, runners plugged into devices that monitor your heart rate so you can calculate your physical state and forecast the approximate age of your death. In the time Kelly and I have known each other the suburb has changed from a stronghold of Greek and Italian elders who congregate with their cigarettes by their beloved sea wall, or on the buses with their shopping bags and ancient language of gossip, into the realm of liberal white families with black SUVs and renovations, overly busy lives. It changed before our helpless eyes, and we were part of it. A friend who knows such things told me it was the best neighbourhood in the country to buy cocaine and aubergine in the 80s. What a thing, the human zoo. Kelly and I always head seawards past the houses of women we’ve seen at their worst, who’ve seen us at our worst when our babies were small and we were so tired and had no idea what to do with any of it. There was one mother, a woman of infinite kindness, who witnessed me shout-crying at my two-year-old when he lay down in the sugar aisle at the supermarket to display his heartfelt rage at the injustices done to the under-sized. This Janet, an angel, helped me through the checkout and out to the car, my hiccupping, astonished son under one of her arms, her other capable hand on my back while I wept at my own ineptitude. None of us is immune to tragedies big or small—depressions, alcoholic toxicity, infidelity, cancer, our own deflated aspirations. But Kelly and I are heiresses of nothing much, we’re going against the rising tide of the neighbourhood’s affluence. We’re a pair of un-professionals who’ve voted against the greatest con known to humankind—common sense. We did this so we might pursue our obsessions with art. This leaves us with rotting bathrooms but time for friendship. We know we’re lucky. 126

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This particular heavy day we pulled our hoods up against the wind that was coming off the melting Antarctic. We were women of malcontent, walking away with only a slim chance of returning. All week the sea had been wild, throwing up rocks and shells and fish onto the road in an Old Testament fashion that had everyone talking about climate change. No one knew what to do about it. What were we against the giants of industry, against the rising tide of the ocean? On the other side of the world families were drowning trying to escape from their shitty war-torn homes. Babies like my own found dead on the beaches. Kelly stopped to bend and pick something up. ‘You know what this is?’ She held up a thin, blackened piece of flat wire. Our walks are littered with bits of crap that Kelly picks up and pockets. Sometimes I help her, but my attention is unreliable and it’s an unspoken rule that she gets the outside of the footpath, the junk-spotting side. ‘I’ve been collecting them for years.’ She is a woman who sees usefulness where I see rubbish, and didn’t wait for me to guess. ‘It’s a bristle off a streetcleaning truck.’ ‘What are going to do with it?’ ‘I don’t know yet.’ ‘Then you’re just like those guys who put used car parts on their front lawns, thinking that one day they’ll find just what they’re looking for.’ ‘Nope. With me, it’s okay because they’re stored in a labelled box.’ Kelly is a jeweller, although lately that word seems inadequate. Her work has been morphing into something else—an object history of her childhood in an Australian mining town, rows of useful discarded pieces of metal, Bakelite, stone, wood. She finds this stuff everywhere and takes it back to her shed to enamel, polish and drill holes through. When she’s happy with her work she arranges the objects into a very specific order on a white background. Because I lack imagination, I think of these rows as lines in a paragraph. I have no words for what she does, and only understand it a little. What I understand is that she’s trying to show us something about usefulness. She’s tapped into some old form of communication, hieroglyphic. We walked on. The sea was loud, washing hard on the rocks. ‘Oh shit, he’s at it again.’ 127

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Kelly pointed out the bent figure of a man on the beach who was carrying an enormous log on one shoulder, moving about in an unsteady manner due to his load, the rocks underfoot and, it would be fair to observe, his disposition. His work is known locally. He covers the waterfront in all weather, creating and adjusting his particular arrangements: logs balanced on boulders, shrines of greywacke and shells. I christened him Balancingstick-guy. Not original, but you immediately know the guy I mean. Kelly and I have talked about these arrangements, which irritate her. I am ambivalent. ‘Hey you!’ she called out. ‘Leave the beach alone!’ ‘Let him be,’ I said. ‘Why should I? You know I heard the definition of a planet on The Panel the other day—to take up all the space in your local galaxy. That’s what a planet does and that’s what this guy does—he spits everything else out of his orbit so his own needs are met.’ ‘I hate The Panel. The Panel is much worse than what this guy does,’ I said. We watched him. Balancing-stick-guy kept on with his uneven progress, moving his giant trunk of driftwood closer to his unique vision. He didn’t appear to hear the irate woman who was shouting at him; nor did he seem to notice us watching him. He ignored us. ‘He’s just moving a minuscule piece of the beach—it’s a grain of rice,’ I said. ‘It’s visual pollution. Why do I have to look at his obsessions every day?’ said Kelly. ‘He’s doing his art.’ ‘It’s not art, it’s therapy.’ To some extent I could see she was right and I did not wish to begin defending the aesthetic value of a piece of driftwood on a rock. Art shares its uncertain boundaries with our ever-expanding universe. Long may it remain unaccountable. For a moment I thought she was going to veer off the path and grapple the log off the guy, maybe go for his balls. She’s the sort of woman I admire and don’t have the guts to be, a woman who can pick a fight and see it through to its bloody-nosed finale or tearful reconciliation. But she stayed beside me and I looked at her and saw her eyes had softened, gone past the guy to the rough-hewn headland out over the high 128

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sea. The air was very cold in the late afternoon of winter. ‘You know, after ten years I haven’t stopped being amazed by how beautiful this place is.’ I nodded and stood beside her, watching in silence. Beauty should be acknowledged. We passed by Sarah’s house. I’ve known her since we were fifteen and making rocket-fuel from our parents’ liquor cabinets. Those cabinets were so ubiquitous in our childhood—wooden sideboards stuffed with all types of flavoured alcohol—cherry, anise, almond, coffee—but no one I know has them any more. Tastes change. We both try to drink less these days, with varying degrees of success. To anyone, I would describe Sarah’s constitution as ox-like. Rarely does she suffer illness. She is smart and tough-minded, and has always had a job. If anyone is going to lead the planet through the next century, it’s Sarah and Kelly. Not me. We started up the hill track, sludgy with the heavy rain. Parts of the country have gone missing underwater in the recent weather, raw sewage leaking into drinking water, rivers flowing down main streets. Angry residents were caught trespassing no-go zones to get into their soggy houses. Your home is where you want to be in any kind of apocalypse. Above it all, our political leaders pressed their grave faces to the windows of helicopters that hovered above the wreckage and gazed upon the newly formed lakes of our fair country. What did their eyes see from that height? A friend, a fine woman who conducts research into poverty’s growing clientele, told me how regional mayors had to halt their civil emergency work to greet the backlog of concerned politicians for photo ops. I liked hearing this absurd piece of inside knowledge, this small anecdote from the grand charade. If nothing else it affirms my decision to remain in the un-professional sector. Although, this seen-to-be-acting had been getting to me. ‘Lately,’ I told Kelly, ‘I’ve been having trouble breathing.’ I told her of the missing oxygen in my lungs, the despair clamping my heart and making it impossible to run uphill, when running up hills is how I’ve kept myself sane for the last few years. Hills are important for my outmoded idea of progress. At what point did my decline begin, did my progress become regress? On top of this I’ve started breaking out into hives, red splotches over my wrists and thighs, which appear in the morning and 129

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disappear by mid-afternoon. Kelly is also trained as a nurse, so I don’t mind telling her these things. Like many, I prefer something diagnosable, lactose intolerance if you must. ‘The thing with you is you keep a lid on your emotions. You just bam,’ she clapped her hands together with force, ‘and you squash it down flat so nothing leaks out. But I tell you, it always leaks out in some way.’ If it wasn’t for her Australian accent, I would have denied what she was saying and quickly forgotten she’d ever said it. But I was astonished by this explanation made in broad vowels, brash consonants, and although I wouldn’t admit it until much, much later, I knew she was right. Sometimes you recognise the truth by how queasy it makes you feel. Still I denied it. ‘Me?’ I said, ‘I’m an open book.’ At this she burst out laughing. ‘That’s a good one,’ she said. We were on a narrow footpath now, which took us back down the hill. We were passing through the mall of the suburb, its heart, where men worked on their backs under dripping motors in the weekend, listening to those radio shows where people ring in and give their opinions on anything. I don’t understand how anyone can listen to those shows. Most people’s voices are not made for radio and whatever comes out of their mouths is rubbish, yet we live in a time where everyone’s got their own broadcasting channel. It makes me want to puke. ‘I feel like puking,’ I said to Kelly, but she wasn’t listening. I turned back and she’d stopped twenty metres behind me and had her phone out, photographing some minute proof of human genius on the side of a wooden garage door. I jogged back to her, to test out if I really meant it about being sick. My stomach is one of my points of weakness. ‘Check this out,’ she said. It was a perfect hole in the side of a wooden panel on an old garage door. It was a hole for a finger to pull on, a hole through which a rusty chain was looped. The hole’s sides were smoothed down to round soft edges, sanded by time and weather, by fingers. There was something about the wornness of it that soothed me, made my nausea dissolve. I kept my eyes on it while Kelly took photos. ‘I’ve got to get about twenty shots before I get it right,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an Instagram especially for these.’ 130

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‘Huh,’ I said, feeling gloomy. ‘The future belongs to you and your pictures of holes. We’re living in the time of pictures. Written stories are finished. I heard that on the radio recently. It made me want to cry.’ We started to walk again, down the hill. ‘Pictures are just stories,’ said Kelly. ‘Someone’s got to tell stories.’ She pointed out the holes in the lampposts, concrete holes through which steel tape was wound. I think she was doing it to distract me, the way she’d learned to do with her kids when they were grouchy. ‘Aren’t they incredible?’ she said. ‘I’ve never given them any attention before.’ But I looked around. They were everywhere, these holes. I mean, everywhere. I couldn’t walk three metres without meeting another one, in a post or a retaining wall. I looked up. Even the sky had holes in it. Just then, as if to distract us both at a crucial moment of awakening, a pimped white ute with mirrored windows drove past us. As it passed we could hear the full glory of the subwoofer, an invention that rivals the caveman for grunt. The ute was low at the back, like pants worn halfway down a backside. The vehicle did a fast u-turn and drove back, slowing down as it passed us again. Two young men in oversized caps and sunglasses to shield their baby eyes from the dark afternoon peered out at what they now would have recognised as two middle-aged women in walking gear. It must have been a slow day for cruising. I turned to offer a remark that would puncture the earth-burning tyres off their ridiculous automobile, a payback for interrupting the peace between two friends, a word to force these boy-men to see the worldly resources they were wasting, the reckless debt they were accruing against their precious twentyyear-old lives. But my mouth was empty, my lips pursed in a great big O. Sometimes it’s better to let these scenes play out with no dialogue. The sub-woofer woofed from the bowels of the renovated ute and we stared at each other across a moment that stretched longer than time will account for. What, in that specious present, did we see in each other? I cannot begin to speak for a twenty-year-old man, not even in fiction. But Kelly and I, both mothers of boys, were looking for the looking glass through which we might glimpse a peel of hope that our babies would grow up to be nothing like these ones. What choice do we have in such matters? It pulled up a 131

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resolve to be more patient with ourselves and with our sons, with their underage right to be confused in a confusing world. The wheels of their ute turned away, slowly into the future, taking their pale, acned faces into town, to more fertile ground. Our heads swivelled on our respective necks back to the scene before us, our feet kept stride beneath our strong bodies. Naked, we are all soft beasts craving love.

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Appreciated Out of sight for a millennium or two, I’m discovered deep-frozen in the Fox glacier, or perfectly preserved in Gondwanaland peat, or simply wedged between skirting board and floor in someone’s spare room. After such a time, I’m raised trophy high, kissed, cried over, painstakingly restored and displayed in a cabinet with a spotlight and controlled humidity, dusted weekly, exhibited to the nation, to visitors from Patagonia, valued at Sotheby’s, insured for millions, won at auction by a magnate from Manhattan, penthoused, coveted at parties, bequeathed to the Getty, Facebook viralled, printed on stamps, minted on coins, immortalised in bronze, stone, 133

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marble, whichever costs you more. Got that?

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Match Day Clowns Monica came to stay during the second week of September. She said it was the first day of spring; she was wrong about that, and I told her. She looked disappointed as she spoke: ‘First first day of spring, babe. Ducks blooming and whatnot. I thought it would be romantic.’ ‘Romantic?’ ‘Showing up on the first day of spring.’ ‘Might’ve been,’ I said. ‘Bum luck for you in that case,’ she said. I gave her coffee and a biscuit and she sat on the couch. Spare change moved about under the cushions and she looked down between her legs. I was always meaning to empty it out. Buy some milk with the proceeds. Some stamps—send something. ‘I have something for you,’ Monica said. ‘It’s a present, something from other shores.’ ‘Please, no.’ ‘Come on.’ ‘No, no, no.’ ‘See that box? The one with the picture of a—what is it? A box, a box on the front.’ ‘Mmm.’ ‘See that? That’s yours.’ ‘Mine?’ ‘Yours.’ I pulled the object from her things. A picture of a large tape deck on the front. ‘Open it,’ she said. She seemed eager, quietly thrilled by a low-watt anticipation. Perhaps weeks old by this stage. I sat next to her. She put her arm about my shoulders and her head on my neck. Warm things. A sweet junk pile. The thing had heavy staples driven deep into hard cardboard. I went to the kitchen to get a knife of some kind for leverage. But when I came back she had it open. She was spreading polystyrene packing about the floor. 135

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‘It’s a video recorder,’ she said. I didn’t know what that was. ‘You record television on the tapes.’ She held up two tapes. ‘Very good. Why would we want to record television?’ She shrugged, pulling her smock up with her shoulders, fabric riding over her breasts and back down. ‘It’s a thing.’ She looked around the room. ‘Where am I sleeping, Stevie?’ I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer this or just walk up the stairs and see if she followed. So I walked out of the room. And she followed, carrying the largest of the suitcases. * We woke and I picked some sleep from the corners of her eyes. She called me some type of name. A keen word, a term of endearment or some other kind of term that was designed to bring us closer. There was shouting out on the street. Voices like bottles bouncing on concrete. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘I told you,’ I said. She looked at me, her eyes widened. A half smile. I was anticipating this; she had to have been too. It was a known event, predicted on TV, editorialised in newspapers. The prelude came the week previous when crowds gathered on the streets in the late morning. They had just appeared. Some started banging their signs in a burst of early excitement and then retreated to the huddle where expectation murmured, with housewives and vicars giving instructions. This morning they were gathering in silence; the voices just showed its flexibility. ‘Is that them?’ she asked. ‘That’s them.’ ‘Can I see? Open the curtain.’ I leant over her and pulled the rope and they parted just enough. Although it was now afternoon all we could see was the white of the dew on the glass. The sun-gleam blocking out the world beyond the garden. I leant on my elbow and tried to wipe the wet from the window. My arm gave out and I fell on her. She laughed. ‘I’ll make you coffee,’ she said into my ear. ‘It’s still the same, huh? White and sugar?’ She saw me nodding. ‘You know that wasn’t your present? Well, it’s for you. But it wasn’t everything.’ 136

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‘What?’ ‘Come down.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I’ll show you. You’ll have to plug the machine in first, though.’ ‘How’s that?’ ‘You’re good with plugs. I plug things in and fires start.’ We kissed and I went down the stairs and felt past her hips in the narrow kitchen to the lounge as she lit the stove from the matches on the shelf. The aftermath of her arrival still on the floor. I pulled the machine clear of all the packaging and put it atop the television and opened the instruction manual. I was pleased to see the first instruction was to put the machine on top of the TV. Everything else was pretty simple. I soon had the coaxial cables in place and had electricity entering its insides. ‘You done?’ she asked. She was standing in the doorway with a fish slice. ‘Brave boy,’ she said. ‘I’m going to hire myself out to the lonely if this thing catches on.’ ‘So. Here.’ She handed me a tape. I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted me to do with it. ‘Okay and …’ She took it back off of me and pressed a button raising the lid. She enjoyed using short words when she did things. A kind of noun-less commentary. ‘It goes in, like this. Like so.’ She looked at me. ‘Make a triumphant sound.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘Make a noise,’ she said and I said nothing and she said, ‘Okay. And. Ta da!’ The screen was filled with the image of her sister, Jayne. And then her parents and her brother. ‘Say hello, Jayne,’ she said. And I realised Monica was talking from the television. ‘Say hello to Steve.’ ‘Ha!’ I spat. The kind of uncontrolled noise one makes at the unexpected. ‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘Okay. They’re all fine. They all say hello. At some point they all say hello. If you just watch, you’ll see.’ Monica, the Monica next to me, rolled her head on her shoulders. An uncertain movement. Her face came into view on the television. I realised the image was in black and white. Her red hair was a shade of grey different from the rest of the grey. Monica stood in front of the TV admiring her good looks. She pulled me 137

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down onto the couch. She kissed me, which I thought was just a fine thing. She said, ‘It’s good to be here. If I knew where here was. It’s good to be here.’ We watched footage of her family. The people I grew up next to in Wellington before I moved to Mount Eden here in Auckland. My neighbours for seventeen years. They’d left the country twelve years ago and I’d fallen out of contact with all but Monica. I watch the family drift into shot and out again, Monica’s voice cajoling and directing figures through the grey. We hadn’t seen each other for two years, not since I was last in England. We’d written letters of an increasingly desirous nature. We’d written about limbs and mouths. We thought about getting married. Getting divorced. She said she’d bring her family when she came. It was an irritating thing, this thought, that she’d bring them home. I only wanted to see her, to watch her. Despite this, they seemed near all of a sudden, as if trapped outside of distance by her will to film them without filters or direction. Memory reconciled and clear. I shook my head and we let the tape run. We lay about on the couch talking back and forth. * We showered and I washed her hair. By one o’clock the noise outside had grown. We went to the gate to look. Men and women were donning helmets. Placards leaned up against the fence. I gave a little salute to a young man in a moustache. He gave a serious look and waved back at me. I smiled and put my gaze past him and down the street. I looked, just to see that it was still there—Eden Park and all it held. I put sausages on under the grill; Monica sat among the mess of cardboard. She asked what time the game was due to start. I told her soon and she looked disappointed, or agitated. Either way I kept my eyes on the TV. She went to the curtains and peered out. She said she’d never watched rugby before. I said I wasn’t going to explain the rules and she laughed. I moved the coffee table into the centre of the room and put a cloth out. Tomato sauce and bread. Commentators spoke into microphones and the crowd stayed silent as anthems were sung. Monica stood by the door. ‘I feel like an overdue library book,’ she said. ‘That’s my little bit, my little bit of protest.’ ‘It will be over in an hour and a half.’ She came and sat. ‘This is the last of it?’ ‘The last game,’ I said. 138

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She nodded. We watched, the crowd and the anthems. Then she said, ‘Outside, listen.’ I got up and went to the set and turned the sound down. The protesters were shouting in megaphones, coming closer from up the road. The police were banging batons on plastic shields. Monica put her feet under her thighs and put her arms about me as I sat down. The crowd noise swelled outwards from the stadium. I turned the sound back up, but I could still hear it over the TV where the South Africans and New Zealanders bunched together listening to the marching band finishing the national songs. And then it was in the picture, in the picture and in the sky. It entered the stadium, light, white. The camera showed the plane. The light plane. It hung in the centre of the screen as it swung down into Eden Park. It actually entered the stadium. ‘Jesus,’ Monica said. ‘Yeah,’ I said. Then something fell. A bag fell heavy from its door. Someone had opened its door and we saw something fall. ‘Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ. They’ve got a plane out there,’ she said. I looked over my shoulder at the window. I couldn’t see anything through the curtains I’d closed earlier to keep eyes from my screen. I didn’t want a paving stone through the glass. Monica stood and went to the door. I stood too. I had to look. I stood but didn’t move, I kept watching the television. Alan Hewson came into the backline and got the ball to Wilson. ‘They have a fucking plane, Stevie!’ ‘I know.’ But my eyes were still on the screen. Monica went to the machine, the machine on top of the television. She touched a couple of buttons. Lights flashed. The machine clunked, whirred. We left the house. We went to the gate. We stepped out of the bounds of the property. Protesters a hundred metres to the north. Stragglers meandering behind the mass. Injured people were hiding in gardens. Men crying. We went across the road, running up the slight rise so we could get a view over the top of the south stand. The aircraft wobbled in the air out to the west and made an arcing turn, its wings dipped in the sun. It came in and went out of sight behind the main stand. ‘Fuck!’ Monica called out. ‘Christ. It’s …’ Then we heard the whine of the 139

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engine, the clawing as it climbed again. We ran higher. Tree-lined streets. Elegant vehicles far back in driveways. We could see the goalposts. The noise gathered and fell. The high drone of stressed air, noise cut up by the props. Behind us a group of men in clown costumes; one had his face streamed in blood. They were making pace away from an upturned car. They stalled and watched the aircraft. We could see the man at the controls as it came overhead. We could see the man at the door. We could see the rubber tread of her wheels. The plane leant and fell once more. And again. And again; this time it flew between the uprights. Wings tilting. Vomit came into my mouth, I went to my knees. Vertigo shock. The shudder of air through its struts as it flew at the park. I crawled and heard someone shout that cars were on fire. Monica yelled something; she pulled me up. Men with blood on their faces and clothes. Clown makeup and the rest. I started the walk back to the house. Slowly. I was holding the side of my head. I felt in my pocket for the house keys. I opened the gate and went down, sat on the lawn and closed my eyes. Monica came to me and kissed my temple. ‘Stand up, Stevie. Up, honey. Come on. Stand up.’ In the lounge I went to the TV and turned it off. We tried to sleep. I lay and closed my eyes against the noise and more noise. I rolled over and turned into her body. Softness. I closed my eyes. All I could see was the aircraft tilting its wings. Arching on the air. I closed my eyes; I saw it clipping the posts and falling sideways. The whole of TV watching as fifty, one hundred, three thousand burnt. Numbers that just keep going up until we stopped counting. * I watched the game in the following days. Monica rewound the tape and the machine repeated the afternoon. The crowd stood and screamed. The plane never hit. There was no hole full of burning people. The plane never hit. And Monica, she was kind. She held my hand. We watched again, waiting. I rewound the tape. I watched it again. I waited. I rewound and waited and let the tape run. I let tackles be missed and waited. I let the ball miss the posts; I let the ball sail between the posts. I let All Black Hewson put his arms in the air; I let him salute the air. I let the crowd scream; I let the air pass through me. I watched till the end; I watched till her family appeared in the gap after the noise. I listened for my name. I watched and listened for my name. 140

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Exit Glacier

see how this ice filters light luminous blue the crunch underfoot sharp splinters of ancient rain a katabatic wind tears at me tries to suck me down rock groans the grind of glacier carving passage gurgle of melt-water under the surface a hidden river I thought it would be quiet here peaceful I let go the barrier give myself over to you unlike that day I couldn’t no matter how hard I tried you were ready to go but my fingers held tight while yours clawed my sleeve already I’m longer than you on this earth & any day may be my last still you have gifts for me pearls: how to

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leave with equanimity what is to come now I come to you down down tugged by the turbulence of heat meeting cold well met you embrace me take my fears to you as always the return journey is easy I take one last look at the ice burning pink

1 The Exit Glacier, Seward, Alaska

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The Paua Sisters They hadn’t set out the chairs yet at the back of Readings bookshop for the poetry, so Carla went next door to Tiamo for a coffee and a cigarette. She checked the outside tables. Yes, people were smoking and not getting any grief, and there were ashtrays on some of the tables. She ordered and paid for her latte at the counter. Then fumbled in her bag for the tobacco tin she used as an ashtray, as neither of the empty tables was supplied. But three people stood to go, so she scooped up their ashtray as she passed, and sat herself down. She looked around for Amy. Not that she knew what Amy looked like. Her publisher in New Zealand had sent her an email to say young Amy was arriving in Melbourne, and was promising, very promising, so would Carla meet and greet etcetera. So far the meeting and greeting had been done by email, because the promising young poet was flat out waitressing in a café, and no designated meet had been possible. Amy hadn’t replied to the latest email, but Carla looked for her. Looked for a young female poet from New Zealand. Maybe she would turn up. Maybe she would finish her shift, discard her oversized black apron in the laundry hamper, and head for Readings and the free poetry they laid on once a month. There was a solitary young woman, but she was rather chic, with tawny blonde hair and a suave yet demure jacket. Carla picked that she was not a poet. While Carla was staring and musing the young woman glanced up, and fixed her with a meaningful intentness. Her packet of tobacco and lighter lay on the table in front of her. She had no ashtray. ‘Sorry,’ Carla said to her. ‘Were you going to swoop on that ashtray when it came free?’ ‘I was,’ the woman said. ‘But maybe we could share?’ And she neatly joined Carla and smiled at her as she rolled her smoke. She was wearing several bracelets that clattered together as she lifted the

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rollie to her lips to wet it. One was made of pāua shell. The familiar iridescent blue-green glint caught Carla’s attention, and she extended her hand to display her pāua ring. ‘I see we both like pāua.’ ‘I got this in New Zealand,’ the woman said. ‘In Wellington.’ ‘So did I.’ ‘I’m from Wellington.’ ‘So am I.’ They smiled and shook hands across the table. Her name was Eliza and she was on her way home from her administrative job at the STI clinic in Swanston Street. When Carla wondered why it was STI rather than STD, Eliza explained they were sexually transmitted infections now, not diseases. She was new to the job and the city, but so far she liked Melbourne. She hadn’t made any friends yet but she expected that she would make friends. And she paused to allow Carla to tell some of her own back story. ‘I’m a poet,’ confessed Carla. ‘Not that I can make a living out of it. I have a funding body. My husband.’ ‘I don’t have one of those.’ ‘Funding body? Or husband?’ ‘Neither.’ The waitress delivered their coffees. They each stirred the ferny image that was etched into the froth with their spoons. ‘I’m going to a poetry reading. At Readings.’ Carla pointed at the façade. ‘There’s a New Zealand poet called Alan Loney that I’ve never heard read.’ ‘Alan Lonely?’ Eliza asked. ‘Perhaps he is lonely but he’s called Loney.’ Carla glanced around for anyone who might be Amy. ‘And I’m waiting for a New Zealand poet who has just arrived in Melbourne. She’s from Wellington too. But I don’t know what she looks like.’ ‘Just look for someone wearing pāua,’ said Eliza smartly. And made use of the mutual ashtray. ‘Now there’s a thought,’ Carla said. She lit up another smoke. The poetry would last at least an hour and a half and she needed to fortify herself. Then she spotted a slim young woman with a lip piercing and jagged orange hair. She was loitering in Readings’ doorway looking this way and 144

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that. Carla caught a glimpse of blue-green on a leather thong around her neck. ‘That’s her,’ she said to Eliza. And she lifted a hand and gestured at the young woman. Amy, for it was Amy, came towards them and asked—‘Carla?’ ‘I’m Carla, and this is Eliza. I’m glad you could come tonight.’ Amy sat at their table. There was a moment of awkwardness. Then Eliza said, ‘I see you’re wearing pāua.’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Amy. And she added with an energetic irony, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ It was an elegant piece in the shape of an unfolding fern. ‘It’s a koru,’ explained Amy. ‘My gran gave it to me so I would always remember where I came from.’ Eliza jangled her bracelet and Carla held up her hand to display her ring. ‘Oh hell,’ said Amy. ‘We’re the pāua sisters.’ ‘And we’re all from Wellington,’ said Carla. ‘Miramar.’ ‘The Hutt,’ said Eliza. Amy reddened a little and said, ‘Karori, but not the posh part.’ ‘Never mind,’ said Carla. ‘None of that matters in Melbourne.’ Nodding towards the ashtray, Amy asked, ‘And do both of you smoke? That’s odd these days.’ She added, ‘I used to smoke the odd one. My gran smokes. If her lungs look anything like the walls of her lounge room …’ ‘My lungs must be well-kippered,’ said Carla. ‘I have two rollies with my coffee after work,’ Eliza said. That wasn’t the truth of course, but the other two let her get away with it. ‘Can I bludge one?’ asked Amy. ‘Before they pass a law against it.’ She accepted a tailor-made from Carla. Eliza gave her a light. ‘My ex-boyfriend told me to quit. So I quit. And that’s good, right? But I left the country to get away from him. You know.’ ‘I can’t remember why I left.’ Carla turned the pāua ring on her finger. ‘But it was a very long time ago.’ ‘I don’t know why I left,’ said Eliza. ‘Restless, maybe. Maybe I’ll go back.’ ‘Do you miss the place at all?’ Amy blew an expert smoke ring up into the Melbourne evening sky. ‘Not yet,’ said Eliza. ‘More than I can say,’ said Carla. ‘More and more. But I can’t go back. My

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children are Australians.’ ‘You have children?’ Amy sounded surprised. ‘Two Australians.’ Eliza looked thoughtful. ‘I don’t know that I would like to give birth to Australians.’ And then she laughed. ‘If it ever came to that.’ The waitress whisked away the empty coffee cups and the ashtray. Amy was left stranded with a glowing stub of a cigarette. ‘Oops,’ she said. Carla produced the tobacco tin from the side pocket of her handbag and proffered it. ‘Thanks. Cool.’ Amy ground her butt out. Carla flipped the lid shut. ‘That’s nifty,’ said Eliza. She gathered up her things and stood. ‘This has been nice. We’ll meet again, maybe.’ With a cool nod of leave-taking, she left. ‘I thought she was your friend,’ said Amy. ‘It can feel like that sometimes.’ ‘It can.’

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Liking the Local A reading of Charles Brasch’s poem ‘The Clear’1 It is all the sky Looks down on this one spot, All the mountains that gather In these rough bleak small hills To blow their great breath on me, And the sea that glances in With shining eye from his epic southern prairies; Working together Time-long World’s way.

The Clear is a park in Dunedin’s town belt. People play soccer there. Charles Brasch used to come to this park and look out across north Dunedin to the hills, the harbour, and the sea. ‘The Clear’ is also a poem. Its title words feel wider and deeper than a place for simple appreciation of the landscape. They resonate with mysticism. They suggest a state of mind attained after many travails, or, in physical form, a place a person goes to understand things that are normally obscured. Right from the first line the scale of everything is cosmic. When ‘all the sky looks down on this one spot’ I feel a blast of Old Testament divinity. I like a personal interest from above, even if I know that what follows it isn’t likely to be very comforting. Pretty soon, even without the footnote, it is obvious that The Clear is a New Zealand place. I recognise it by its ‘rough bleak’ hills. I like that the big sky gives its attention to a place I recognise. This is me, now, liking the local. When I was younger I was not a fan of the local, or Brasch’s poems. In those days I was slightly irritated by places like Waianakarua, a tiny town on the main highway from Oamaru to Dunedin which had never done anything bad to me except not be ‘sympathique’. New Zealand was mostly made up of places like this, and in my mind the only thing to do with all this 147

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nothing was to try to pass by as rapidly as possible and hope you ended up somewhere urban before it got dark. I found it annoying and also embarrassing that someone would try and make a poem out of a place with nothing except sheep and a service station. But that, as I say, was when I was young, before I saw the yellow light. I’m impressed that Brasch, writing this poem in the iconoclastic late 1960s or early 70s, would invoke something as close to the divine as this sky in such an unabashed way. Even at sixty, there are so many topics I don’t have the courage to write about, or perhaps, more accurately, stand behind. I wrote a poem once where a sky-being looks down through the skylight of an apartment block on a young man lying in a dishevelled bed. I loved the tube of light falling on the young man whose pale skin and black hair seemed somehow to be offset with a dash of crimson fabric. I liked the dust motes and the young man’s sleepy awareness of warmth and light. I lacked the courage to publish that poem. Brasch suffers no such timidity. He makes the whole sky, the wind from the mountains and the southern sea converge at this soccer ground and engage with the place. Then he makes the wind breathe on him. Not on the place, on him. I like the nerve of that. The whole poem is small, fewer than fifty words in total, which makes every word seem important. The word ‘me’, the only time the writer appears as himself, is such a tiny inclusion, in one way so modest and unassuming. And yet the word ‘me’ rings out like a bell, calling me in to the scene. Poetry is not a rational thing, so I will just say, without explanation or justification, that because he is there, as himself, I can be there. After the poet has felt the gaze of the sky and the breath of the mountains, the shining eye of the sea ‘glances in’. Not the half-tamed sea of the inner harbour, the mirror-glass sea of the road to Aramoana. Not the safe-forchildren sea of the saltwater baths at St Clair. The shining eye of the sea in this poem comes from the Roaring Forties, the ‘epic southern prairies’ of water and waves. I have seen this sea. It swirls deep and dangerous onto the rocks at the end of the spit at Aramoana. Gannets fall from the sky and silkies roll in and out of the kelp as if it were easy to live there. The best humans can do at the spit is build and rebuild a temporary projection from the shore into the sea. A rusting projection from World War Two runs alongside the current one. The wind here, the ‘great breath’, is strong enough to rock railway sleepers. 148

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The prairie sea that we glimpse here is never finished with its fierce coming and going. The setting of this poem is much more specific than New Zealand. It is Dunedin. Once I had read that The Clear, in physical form, was a soccer ground, I knew without being told that there would be almost-a-circle of rough-mown grass and a caretaker’s shed where the mower is stored. More importantly, I knew that occasionally the clouds would part and blue sky would be visible over the grassy place and that there would be sticky grey clay underneath that grass. I know that circle of ‘rough bleak’ hills that surrounds the city too, and the exact shades of green created by scrubby mānuka, macrocarpa and gorse. Brasch and I share a fondness for the word ‘rough’. ‘Bleak’, however, is a word I never use. When I was a child the wind that came from the mountains further back, behind the hills, cut through my woolly jerseys as though they were lace. Back then adults would use this word ‘bleak’ when speaking of the wind. But ‘bleak’ was much more than the wind. ‘Bleak’ was them, their brick houses with tiny windows, the grey prickles of their upholstery fabric, the meat you saved for tomorrow, the cold you felt on your back even when you faced the fireplace and strangely, the brief appearance and rapid disappearance of the sun. I was afraid that if I emerged from my book I would die of ‘bleak’. To protect myself I tried not to look at telegraph poles sticking out of the mud at Waitati; I stayed in the car until the last possible minute and, above all, never voluntarily touched the earth or allowed it to touch me. I didn’t really know what I wanted the world to be like, but this Dunedin and this ‘nature’ was definitely not it. I have heard of children who have a feeling they do not belong to the parents who are raising them. I had a feeling then that I did not belong to the country I was living in. Along the way that has changed and now I feel that I do belong to Aotearoa New Zealand and to Dunedin. None of it belongs to me, and I don’t think it should, but I belong to it. Last September, in the Dunedin Botanic Garden, I read a sign about the activities of the Otago Acclimatisation Society, which brought plants and animals from the old country and tested them to see which would thrive here. As I thought about that, a long pendulum began to swing inside me which I understood to be a biological proof of successful transplantation. 149

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My sixty-year-old self is interested in whether ‘The Clear’ is an ‘old man’s’ poem, the encounters with the sublime sky and sea perhaps something akin to the awareness of white light that some people say they see in the moments before death. I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions so I look back at older poems written by a younger Brasch. I see that wind and waves and hills and mānuka and time are all there in 1939, in Brasch’s first collection, The Land the People and Other Poems.2 But here, in later life, the preoccupations of this poem—the sky, the light, the sea, the wind, the mountains and the work of time—have been reduced and reduced until the poem is down to an assertive and strongly flavoured essence. I detect an impatience with distraction or untrustworthy consolation in this poem but, however hard I try, I cannot quite locate the place in the poem where I receive this message. Although I do not live in Dunedin now, I remember the streets near the soccer ground well, which leads me to create, in my mind, a version of the poet’s experience of walking from the his house to The Clear. I start my hypothetical re-creation before the poem starts. As the poet walks into the town belt, along Queens Drive and Lachlan Avenue towards The Clear, he sees in his mind’s eye how the place would be when he got there. How he would be. When you travel the same route often you know the places where you have doubts and where you can expect to be uplifted. I know for instance that sometimes, in Dunedin, at three o’clock, no matter what has happened before, yellow light falls over everything, creating a gold-edged warmth. This yellow light, which I first noticed through the kitchen window when I was in my late teens, struck me as new and beautiful. It made me look out that window each time I passed by. It made me notice the trees on our section, and it made me appreciate light. There is no yellow light in the poem ‘The Clear’, but I add some, because it could happen in the moment of the sky clearing. Then I take things a bit further because Brasch noticed ‘the light on his face’ in another poem,3 and because I know how it feels to have the sun shine on your face. It makes you want to take in the warmth, take every possible moment of it, because there are plenty of days and even years when there is nothing else as simple and benign as this feeling of warmth. If it was one of the gold-edged days, I decide, the poet might, somewhat sheepishly, lie himself down full length on the grass, consciously put aside warnings about damp, and close his eyes. The slightest warmth on his face, a

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moment’s separation between clouds through which the sun could warm him, or even the briefest softening of the easterly wind would be enough to take him deep into the deep space between the sea and the sky, so deep that he could forget the shadow coming, miss the beginning of its crawl over the mower shed and across the grass, miss the sudden silence of the gulls and the long, slow change of his twill pants from chill to wet. He could lie so still, dreaming all, that one day a boy arriving for soccer practice might rouse him with a scooping-up, lifting kind of kick, saying later that he had mistaken the man for a pile of dead brown leaves. Despite my enthusiasm, my fall into this poem is to an extent a house built on sand. Alan Roddick, Brasch’s literary executor, selected ‘The Clear’ for the anthology Charles Brasch Selected Poems from a folder containing unpublished poems. He has given ‘The Clear’ an important place as the final poem in the collection. However, as Roddick says in his introduction, at the time of his death, Brasch may not have been finished with this poem. The final three lines of ‘The Clear’, dealing with time, are somewhat different in tone from the rest of the poem. The words are blunt messages, banged together and heavy footed. I read this poem with a group of very elderly poetry lovers last week and they told me these three lines were the most meaningful parts of the poem to them. It is simple, they said. We pass quickly but all of this—the sea, the sky and the wind—will always be here. That is the way of the world. They smiled kindly. The fact that The Clear is a soccer ground has turned out to be no obstacle to moments of cosmic wonder. But of course I knew that. You can find grand beings in muddy and mundane places, but you have to get out of the car. 1 The final poem in Charles Brasch Selected Poems, chosen by Alan Roddick, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2015, 143. 2 The Land the People and Other Poems, Caxton Press, Christchurch, 1939. 3 From Back from Death, 6, ‘Titus Reading’. Charles Brasch Selected Poems, 142.

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THE CASELBERG TRUST INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2016

Judge’s Report No writer who has ever entered a competition needs to be reminded how much depends on the assumptions, the expectations, the vagaries of the judge’s imposing eye and assessing ear. So before the whistle is blown, so to speak, on this year’s Caselberg, it’s as well to know what the referee was inclined to be alert to, the linesman (presuming the one person plays at both) on the watch for. Which was this: anything confirming his belief that good poetry for the most part comes down to how language is engaged with, and to what is done with the enormously varied potential for saying things in ways that have not been said quite like that before. With a good poem something new takes us by surprise—a rare turn of imagery, a compelling rhythmic drive, a sense of strangeness or the unexpected shading the everyday, and at best, such elements combining towards a satisfaction that can’t in fact be aimed for until voilà, there it is! (Think of how even the arch-formalist Paul Valéry placed such store on chance.) It is a truism that you cannot read 250 poems of varying quality without their telling you something, quite apart from poetry, about the community they share. You note how the greater number of them want to talk about loss, about loneliness; and when it comes to love, more about its disappointments than its satisfactions. This shouldn’t surprise us too much. Pick up many anthologies and you are struck by the same thing. Here are experiences, moods, attempts at clarification that poetry always has attended to. In New Zealand you can certainly say there is no shortage of such motifs. But you may find not much irony, and little that’s satirical; and surprisingly, not as much as you might expect that engages with the natural world and how we relate to it, estimate it, mess it about—far less than in contemporary Australian poetry. There’s an overwhelming preponderance of poems unlikely to be drawn to formal or apparent structure, or to the challenges of extended design; there’s a faith in the quick-hit metaphor, in the hope a sudden swerving from 152

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continuity to random association is a proven ‘poetic’ move. These remarks are generalisations, of course, and there are poems that give them the lie. You might say this is more of sociological relevance anyway, as one passes from what a poem occupies itself with in a straightforward topical sense to the far more interesting question of how it is made, how it stands on its own feet as it goes beyond the occasion that set it ticking. A good poem is always language earning its keep, in a voice that is seldom too like any other—its syntax, its rhythm, its visual flare, its direct or indifferent or cunning way with ideas, demanding we look to the craft of how it was brought off. After a narrowing down to twenty or so poems, I chose ‘Bold Feral and Tender’ for how deftly it drew out the possibilities of its title, for the way it demonstrated why each of those words was so justly apt. At times its lines may have hovered on overstatement, its diction sloped towards more than may have been called for, and yet that sense of risk in itself added a constant sense of control to the impact it carried. The romantic assumption of some lines, the didactic tone of others, the steely eye that dominated what you could call the persistent balance, finally met and settled on the toughness and wit of the last line. While on the way towards that, I admired the rhythmic drive of the four- and five-stress lines, so close to casual speech yet clearly more, and the effect of the confidently extended sentences across twentyseven lines that dispensed with conventional punctuation. Another risk, but again one brought off, as if enacting that broad notion of freedom and swoop so central to the poem. The second-placed poem, ‘At the Caselberg House in Broad Bay, Dunedin’, impressed me for a similar reason. Here was an experience, a sequence of observations, grasped at and held in a sustained pattern, imaginatively complete. Everything in its total effect seemed carefully prepared for, which is a very different thing from simply pre-designed. (Here was an inevitable expansion to its taking in of how a particular scoping of place and occasion might be framed.) ‘Agreement Made on this Day’ drew me with its sharp mordant wit, its impression of language played as a game, before the realisation that it was a good deal more than that, as it touched the poignancy, the individual bewilderment, that can be there in the cold corridors of legalese. These others, too, for different reasons: ‘Learning My Partner’s Language’ 153

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with its notion that we define ourselves (by the extent that experience is aligned to how free we are to speak of it), that not having the right words when we need them can be part of an imposed abuse; ‘Milking’ putting me in mind of that rich tradition in our poetry—Ruth Dallas, so much of Baxter, Glover, more recently Bob Orr—in which how we talk about what we physically do as everyday routine is a way to talk of so much more than that, a way to assess the reality that defines us. ‘The Comfort of Stories’ gave me the sense that here was a complete statement, each section worked at for itself, and that attention carrying it through to its place in a larger framing of grief, maturity, composure. ‘Sure-footed’ was an apt title for a poem of adroit technical finesse, a ‘freerange’ sonnet that precisely caught the emphases of a child’s awareness, with an adult’s patterning eye. In ‘Clearing Out My Parents’ House’ a writer finds a heightened sense of her own immediacy in the surviving scraps and relics of what had been her parents’ lives, a direct poem that manages to thread celebration through what is, of course, a context of total loss, yet do so in a way that is also curiously upbeat and sardonic. Vincent O’Sullivan Winner: ‘Bold Feral and Tender’ by Leslie McKay Runner-up: ‘At the Caselberg House in Broad Bay, Dunedin’ by Riemke Ensing. Highly Commended: ‘Agreement Made on this Day’ by Paula Clare King; ‘Learning My Partner’s Language’ by Michaela Keeble; ‘Milking’ by Jillian Sullivan; ‘The Comfort of Stories’ by Riemke Ensing; ‘Sure-footed’ by Kerrin Sharpe; ‘Clearing Out My Parents’ House’ by Lynne Kohen. The winning and runner-up poems appear on the following pages. All eight poems are published on the website of the Caselberg Trust and in the unexpected greenness of trees: Poems from the Caselberg Trust’s International Poetry Competition 2011–2016, edited by Claire Beynon and Alan Roddick and published in November 2016 by the Caselberg Trust.

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L E S L I E M C K AY

Bold Feral and Tender Her hands sang as she fed Avro Vulcan the orphaned falcon dead cockerel chicks as bright and sweet as toys in eggs of Easters past if not for their bloody beaks She abhorred the hint of suffering but deep in bird eat bird reality bowed to nature with alacrity the refugee from the quivering city on the deviant plain where she made a living with her head and often felt empty before her flight into the alpine valley laughed at the lie as fast became slow as her green fingers became leaves branching into honeydew trees where the murmuring bees bumbled her face as though she were a flower on the mountainside recording the autobiography of the earth bold feral and tender as any romance the farmers were killing with possession the world chose not to see If Avro Vulcan were an imported dove she could hold in a cage and coo she would miss her carved and precision pointed from beak to tail comical at times when she demanded extra food on the lawn where if she could speak with her talons spread wide she would say come on bitch night is falling

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RIEMKE ENSING

At the Caselberg House in Broad Bay, Dunedin Open the door and you enter a painting [Anna Caselberg] all blue and space whirling its turbulence out in resolute sweeps towards a winter horizon. Space is what we look for. That difficult freedom giving room to move, to think, to be other than the every desperate day. Paintings turning white under Otago clouds. The still centre escaping into melancholy sky. Must everything be metaphor? Look at the water. Every movement exploding with light into glorious fractures. Each wave smoothing down rocks into palettes of colour. Viridian, sienna, emerald green, gold, yellow ochre, orange deep —none of the names in my father’s pre-war wooden paint box quite matching that complicated sheen caressed from millennia. The palest jade. The colour of kina shells. I think of the painter and her small range of pigments. How scattered silver changes not only the colour of sky. How empty spaces speak.

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The Landfall Review

Landfall Review Online www.landfallreview.com

Reviews posted since April 2016 (Reviewer’s name in brackets) April 2016 The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, eds Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (David Eggleton) Calls to Arms, Steven Loveridge (David Eggleton) How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War, eds Charles Ferrall and Harry Ricketts (David Eggleton) The Anzacs: An inside view of  New Zealanders at Gallipoli: Photographs from the Auckland War Museum, with essays by Damien Fenton and Shaun Higgins (David Eggleton) The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington: Dissent and conformity in wartime New Zealand, John Pratt (David Eggleton) The Dreaming Land, Martin Edmond (Lindsay Rabbitt) The Pale North, Hamish Clayton (Helen Watson White) Fracking and Hawk, Pat White (John Horrocks) Work, Sarah Jane Barnett (John Horrocks) The Blue Voyage and Other Poems, Anne French (John Horrocks) Entangled Islands, Serie Barford (Siobhan Harvey) Tender Machines, Emma Neale (Siobhan Harvey) Girls of the Drift, Nina Powles (Siobhan Harvey) This Must Be the Place, Annabel Hawkins (Lynley Edmeades) Miss Dust, Johanna Aitchison (Lynley Edmeades) May 2016 Starlight Peninsula, Charlotte Grimshaw (David Eggleton) The Writers’ Festival, Stephanie Johnson (David Eggleton) Daughters of Messene, Maggie Rainey-Smith (Michelle Elvy) The Scene of the Crime, Steve Braunias (Denis Harold) Zizz! The life and art of Len Lye, in his own words, Len Lye with Roger Horrocks (Andrew Paul Wood) Boundaries: People and places of Central Otago, Brian Turner (Jenny Powell) Huia Short Stories 11: Contemporary Maori fiction, eds Witi Ihimaera, Sir Wira Gardiner and Poia Rewi (Vaughan Rapatahana) For Someone I Love: A collection of writing, Arapera Blank (Vaughan Rapatahana) crimson, Marino Blank (Vaughan Rapatahana) June 2016 Taking My Mother to the Opera, Diane Brown (Sarah Jane Barnett) Excerpts from a Natural History, Holly Painter (Sarah Jane Barnett)

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The Burnt Hotel, Olivia Macassey (Sarah Jane Barnett) The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One Hundred Ways to Read a City, Fiona Farrell (Andrew Paul Wood) King Rich, Joe Bennett (Nicholas Reid) Mean, Michael Botur (Piet Nieuwland) Breaking Connections, Albert Wendt (Michael O’Leary) July 2016 Shelf Life, C.K. Stead (Denis Harold) Going South: A road trip through life, Colin Hogg (Nicholas Reid) 52 Men, Louise Wareham Leonard (Michelle Elvy) Memorandum of Understanding, Bill Nelson (Piet Nieuwland) The Blue Outboard, Nicholas Williamson (Piet Nieuwland) This Paper Boat, Gregory Kan (Piet Nieuwland) Lonely Earth, MaryJane Thomson (Robert McLean) Cards on the Table, Jeremy Roberts
(Robert McLean) The Empire City, Andrew Laking (Robert McLean) August 2016 Failed Love Poems, Joan Fleming (Elizabeth Morton) Ocean and Stone, Dinah Hawken (Elizabeth Morton) Cold Water Cure, Claire Orchard (Elizabeth Morton) The Blackbird Sings at Dusk, Linda Olsson (Felicity Murray) Dad Art, Damien Wilkins (Tim Jones) Something Else, David Parkyn (Murray Edmond) Main Trunk Lines, Michael O’Leary (Kay McKenzie Cooke) Possibility of Flight, Heidi North-Bailey (Kay McKenzie Cooke) Poroporoaki to the Lord My God: Weaving the Via Dolorosa: Ekphrasis in response to Walk (Series C) Colin McCahon, Anahera Gildea (Kay McKenzie Cooke) Thought Horses, Rachel Bush (James Norcliffe) Rabbit Rabbit, Kerrin P. Sharpe (James Norcliffe) As the Verb Tenses, Lynley Edmeades (James Norcliffe) September 2016 Māori Art: History, architecture, landscape and theory, Rangīhiroa Panoho (David Eggleton) Deleted Scenes for Lovers, Tracey Slaughter (Raewyn Alexander) Seelenbinder: The Olympian who defied Hitler, James McNeish (Brian Clearkin) The Gentlemen’s Club, Jen Shieff (Jennifer Lawn) Being Chinese: A New Zealander’s Story, Helene Wong (Maggie Rainey-Smith) Here/Now: 8 Plays by Award-winning NZ Playwrights, Playmarket Play Series ed. David O’Donnell (Helen Watson White) In the Supplementary Garden, Diana Bridge (Elizabeth Heritage) Fish Stories, Mary Cresswell (Elizabeth Heritage) Anatomize, Natasha Dennerstein (Elizabeth Heritage)

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Cultural Capital by Lawrence Jones

Bloomsbury South: The arts in Christchurch 1933–1953, by Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2016), 354pp, $69.99

In tracing the history of the artistic developments springing from a group of people concerned with the creation and public appearance of works of literature and other arts in Christchurch between 1933 and 1953, Peter Simpson found the ideal focus for synthesising many of the interests he has explored in a long and prolific academic career at the universities of Canterbury and Auckland. In Bloomsbury South’s bibliography he lists eight of his books, monographs or long essays that deal with one or more of the workers in the arts from the period who also figure in this book. Four of these works involve Colin McCahon as a major figure: on his own at Titirangi in the years immediately following 1953 and in his long-term relationships with Charles Brasch, James K. Baxter and John Caselberg. Two of them deal with the Caxton Press and people associated with it—the ‘odd couple’ at the centre of Caxton, Denis Glover and Leo Bensemann. Two of them deal with individuals: Bill Pearson, most of whose main works appeared after 1953, but who figures as a secondary actor in three of Bloomsbury’s

nine chapters; and Bensemann, perhaps the least known of the major figures in the book, but one who appears in all but two chapters and is seen by Simpson as a crucial linking figure in the Christchurch arts world. In addition, the bibliography lists six publications Simpson has edited: a collection of engravings on wood, a collection of drawings, and collected notes on painting by Bensemann; Curnow’s collected critical writing; Charles Spear’s collected poems; and McCahon’s Rita: Seven Poems. Simpson has also published online two essays in which he has discussed the aims, themes and structure of his book. The first and fullest is the paper he delivered as the keynote address ‘A Multidisciplinary Approach to Cultural History’ to the Michael King Writers’ Seminar at Long Bay during Labour Weekend in 2013. This was written when he was about a quarter of the way through a draft of the book. The second is the ‘Book of the Week’ essay sponsored by Unity Books in the online publication the Spinoff of 28 July 2016. The clearest account of the origin of the book occurs in the latter: ‘The phrase “Bloomsbury South” first occurred to me about 15 years ago while curating an exhibition I called The Cambridge Terrace Years: Rita Angus and Leo Bensemann.’ In putting together that exhibition, Simpson was struck by the resemblance to London’s Bloomsbury Group of the complex relationships, both personal and artistic, of the three people who shared the flat at 97 Cambridge Terrace

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in the late 1930s – Angus, Bensemann and Lawrence Baigent, and how their outreach led to the flat becoming an epicentre for gathering people animated by ‘the forces of friendship, artistic experiment, radical politics, pacifism and variety of sexual preference’. The little ‘Bloomsbury South’ of 97 Cambridge Terrace was to become the focus of Simpson’s third chapter, ‘Angus, Bensemann, Woollaston and The Group’, concentrating on the visual arts. Fifteen years and many studies and exhibitions after getting that initial insight, when he was planning the book, it came to Simpson ‘that the Bloomsbury analogy applied not just to the scenes at Cambridge Terrace but to the whole Christchurch art world … In the heady mix of politics art, sexuality, and unconventional attitudes and behaviour the whole scene bears a striking resemblance to Bloomsbury – or so I argue.’ In his Introduction Simpson implies another link between the Christchurch artists and the Bloomsbury Group in the 1930s and 1940s when he quotes in his first paragraph the famous passage from John Lehmann’s 1955 autobiography, The Whispering Gallery. In this the English poet and editor asked why Christchurch, out of the hundreds of towns in the Englishspeaking world in the 1930s, was the only one to ‘act as a focus of creative literature of more than local significance’; why it should be in Christchurch that ‘a group of young writers had appeared who were eager to

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assimilate the pioneer developments in style and technique that were being made in England and America since the beginning of the century … and to give their country a new conscience and spiritual perspective’. Lehmann had been associated with the Bloomsbury Group, as had his novelist sister Rosamond, and in the first half of the 1940s he had published in his Penguin New Writing work by Sargeson, Glover, Curnow and Brasch. In 1984, in his Introduction to Anthony Stones’ Celebration: Anthology of New Zealand writing from the Penguin New Writing series, Lehmann quoted that same passage and then stated: ‘The question remained unanswered.’ He went on to assert that the fact that the gathering did happen was more important than ‘the rather mysterious concatenation of circumstances, impulses or what you will that brought the phenomenon about’. While Simpson does grant at the close of his Introduction that ‘It is almost always to some extent a mystery why talent suddenly coalesces at a particular place and time, flaring into something unexpected and extraordinary,’ he confidently states that ‘Bloomsbury South explores and documents some of the possible causes and reveals the rich achievements and interconnected lives of a fascinating group of artists’ working in Christchurch between 1933 and 1953. He does not claim to show that Christchurch was the only city in the English-speaking world in which this sudden coalescing of talent took place in

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those years, but he does show that something extraordinary did happen that was analogous to what happened in Bloomsbury and that made Christchurch for a time the cultural capital of New Zealand. In the Preface, Simpson recounts an autobiographical origin of Bloomsbury South unconnected to the Bloomsbury Group or to Lehmann, namely his experiences in Christchurch as a student at the University of Canterbury between 1960 and 1968, and as a staff member there between 1976 and 1992. While a student, he ‘became increasingly aware that, in previous decades, there had been a golden age in the arts in Christchurch which, by the 1960s, had definitely if mysteriously faded’, and he came to ponder ‘the contrast between the scintillating past of Christchurch and its comparatively drab present’, and to ask, ‘Why had the golden weather come to an end? This book is an attempt to answer that question.’ Simpson opens his essay on the Spinoff with a discussion of what he calls a ‘paradox’ and states that it is ‘at the heart of [his] new book’: the generation of artists discussed ‘wanted an art that was true to their own experience as New Zealanders but to do so they had to borrow the forms and techniques of the modernists who were re-making art on the other side of the world, especially (for New Zealanders) in England’. The ‘peak of achievement’, then, was not an internationally significant revolution of the arts or even a revolution important

for all English-speaking peoples. There was no New Zealand Eliot or Joyce or Picasso or Stravinsky inventing new ‘forms and techniques’ to embody their visions. But what was achieved was revolutionary for New Zealand in the way works of art focused unapologetically on New Zealand experience (or at least New Zealand Pākehā experience), while domesticating for New Zealand use some of the formal discoveries of AngloAmerican-European modernism. As Simpson said on the Spinoff, ‘[T]he uncanny synthesis of nationalism and modernism … made that period crucial to our cultural development.’ As Lehmann had implied, there was assimilation as well as invention, and it was significant to all New Zealand. In his seminar paper Simpson emphasised that ‘the efflorescence of the arts in Christchurch was less a local phenomenon than a national movement centred on Christchurch, serving artists throughout the country’. The Caxton Press by 1938 was ‘printing the works of the best writers from around the country, from Auckland (A.R.D. Fairburn) to Southland (M.H. Holcroft)’; while The Group, which, ‘[t]hough Christchurchbased … showed artists from around the country’ by the late 1940s, had become ‘a national institution, unchallenged for leadership of the visual arts’. Simpson’s first aim in his seminar paper was to justify the Bloomsbury– Christchurch titular analogy. He summarised four ‘broad parallels’ between the 1933–53 Christchurch scene

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and the ‘somewhat earlier’ Bloomsbury scene: ‘the presence in both places of talented individuals of both sexes who were closely linked by friendship or even more intimate relationships’; ‘the frequency of cross-disciplinary collaboration between individuals’; the way ‘the artists banded together for mutual support in the face of hostility from mainstream values and institutions’, especially in relation to pacifism and to differing sexualities; and ‘advocacy of modernism in the arts and hostility to reactionary aesthetic practices’. This schema served as the basis for his more discursive treatment of the parallels in his Introduction to the book. The chronological structure he devised to make clear the ‘parabola of change’ involves three large sections arranged chronologically: pre-war (1933– 38); the war years (1939–45); and postwar (1946–53). The Introduction and Conclusion bookend the three sections. Each chronological section has three chapters, many of them focused on one or more individuals. Chapter one, as Simpson said in his seminar paper, ‘is devoted to the poet Ursula Bethell, less as a poet than as a kind of networker and people-collector’, focusing on the years after the death of Effie Pollen in 1934 when Bethell engaged in an ongoing correspondence with a variety of younger male writers, printers, editors, musicians and painters that ‘helped to establish the network of cross-disciplinary friendships which made Christchurch analogous to

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the Bloomsbury Group’. In chapter two—‘Tomorrow, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow and the Caxton Press’—Glover is the central figure, not as a poet but as a printer and editor in relation to Curnow, his own Caxton Press, and Tomorrow. Chapter four discusses Douglas Lilburn as a composer, in contact and collaboration with his friends in the other arts. Chapter five focuses on Ngaio Marsh as drama producer rather than as writer, in relation to her collaborators in the other arts and to the Little Theatre. In chapter seven, ‘Charles Brasch and Landfall’, Brasch is seen not as a poet but as the founder and editor of the early Landfall, establishing it as the national journal of the arts: ‘a huge consolidation of everything that had happened in the last decade and a half ’. Chapters three and eight each foreground two figures, but in different combinations. Chapter three focuses on the developments in portraiture and landscape paintings by members of  The Group, featuring primarily Angus and Bensemann but also giving individual attention to Woollaston, and all three in relation to The Group. Chapter eight, ‘Colin McCahon and James K. Baxter’, focuses equally on the painter and the poet, tracing singly their parallel developments, including their prominence in Landfall, and notes their friendship and significant collaborations. Chapters six and nine range more widely, with no individuals foregrounded. Chapter six, ‘The Group and the Caxton Press II’, focuses on the two titular

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Christchurch institutions, giving parallel chronological accounts of both. The Group’s three wartime exhibitions (1940, 1943, 1945) are described, emphasising the appearance of such new members as McCahon and Doris Lusk, with Simpson concluding that the organisation ‘had come through the war years in vigorous and confident shape, its “A Team” now complete, and well placed for post-war expansion’. The triumphs and vicissitudes of the Caxton Press, with Glover away in the war after the bumper year of 1940 and Bensemann in charge, are described at much greater length. The link between the two was Bensemann, involved in one as painter and the other as typographer, bridging the two by designing and printing The Group’s catalogues. Chapter nine, ‘Consolidation and Dispersal’, traces in parallel accounts the various 1946–53 histories of   The Group and the Caxton Press and the careers in those years of Lilburn as composer and of Marsh as drama producer. The account of   The Group contrasts the relative success of the large and varied Retrospective Exhibition 1927–47 with a brief account of the Pleasure Garden affair, of which Simpson states, ‘No episode better illustrates the cultural forces— reactionary versus progressive, insiders versus outsiders, philistines versus aesthetes—that prevailed in Christchurch in those decades, especially in the visual arts.’ The account of the Caxton Press includes the sad story of the return and then fall of Glover, but also the triumphs

of some of its most significant publications. Lilburn’s career during these years is fully described: with important interactions with Angus, who advised against his taking the teaching post in Wellington that he finally accepted; with Brasch, who wrote a poem in his honour; and with Glover, whose Sings Harry poems he set to music along with other New Zealand poems, including Alistair Campbell’s Elegy (at Curnow’s request). This inclusive chapter closes with a brief discussion of Marsh’s final theatrical productions, including behind the scenes participation in the production of Curnow’s first play, The Axe, published in a revised version by Caxton in 1949. Simpson’s Conclusion traces the gradual breakup of the Bloomsbury South coalescence as key players died or departed to posts in the North Island as part of the postwar demographic, economic and cultural drift towards Wellington and Auckland. These include: Bethell’s death in 1945; Baxter’s departure to Wellington in 1948; Lilburn’s taking a post at Victoria University in Wellington in 1947 and leaving Christchurch permanently in 1950; Frederick Page joining him there in 1949 accompanied by his wife Eve, an original member of  The Group; Curnow’s journey to London 1949–50 and his move to the University of Auckland in 1951; Marsh’s alternating between London and Christchurch irregularly from 1949; McCahon and Angus going to Wellington in 1953; and

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Glover going to Wellington in 1954. The Caxton Press, after Glover’s departure, became ‘a shadow of its former self in terms of literary importance’. Landfall, however, remained the primary national literary journal, although there was more competition from Wellington journals, and Caxton’s most significant literary publication was Brasch’s anthology of the best from the journal’s first fifteen years, Landfall Country, in 1962. The Group continued as a visual arts institution of national importance, with many of the painters who had left Christchurch still exhibiting with them, joined by a group of younger painters coming out of the revitalised School of Fine Arts, which had become part of Canterbury University College. The final section of his Conclusion Simpson devotes to an overview of the causes for the rise of Bloomsbury South. He acknowledges that demographic factors and more immediate historical pressures were relevant, but he focuses on the concept of ‘a fortuitous coming together of a number of exceptional talents, linked by friendship, mutual stimulation, shared circumstances and opportunities, plus an element of the always inexplicable’. Part of the ‘shared circumstances’ were the values, taste and institutions of the artists of the immediate past and of the artists’ parents’ generation. The geography and history of Canterbury had tended to foster a conservative British tone, caused by the isolation, the open land suited to

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traditional pastoral farming, the predominantly English Anglican settlement, and the lack of a strong Māori presence. One result was the early development of transplanted Victorian institutions and attitudes, a ‘comprehensive if imitative and dependent colonial culture’ which tended, especially in the environment of the Depression, to bring about a generational cultural revolt and such dedicated and oppositional institutions as the Caxton Press, Tomorrow, the Little Theatre and The Group, which in turn attracted younger artists from other centres, and fostered mutual stimulation and collaboration. Simpson thus insists that ‘The importance of friendship and personal contacts cannot be overestimated.’ Bloomsbury South succeeds in what Simpson set out to do—indeed, is a model of a successful cultural history—partly because of its structure, which is appropriate to its material; partly because of its choice of a central analogy that informs the book; and very much because of a wealth of concrete evidence for its argument, drawing on years of dedicated research to provide rich detail concerning the works of art and the lives and interaction of the artists who created it. As a multi-disciplinary cultural history it appropriately does not contain detailed close critical analyses of individual works of art but refers to a great number of them and gives a sense of their nature and of the conditions from which they emerged. When Guy Somerset, in the online New Zealand Festival Magazine of 17 July 2016,

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asked Simpson what was the biggest surprise emerging from his research, Simpson replied that it was ‘the huge importance of personal letters’, available now in archives, very much a feature of life at the time but no longer a part of our electronic world. The book is enriched by hundreds of quotations from correspondence between artists revealing the cross-disciplinary ‘collective creation’, helping to ‘establish the flavour of an intimate network’, as Simpson told Somerset. For example, in his chapter on Bethell, Simpson quotes from an unpublished letter of Lilburn to Brasch in 1965, sharing with Brasch how moved he was by the poet’s tribute to Bethell in The Estate, how it awakened memories of his friendship with her in her last years and her burial in which he took part: ‘an unforgettable hour of Canterbury skies & windblown trees’. Among the most interesting letters are those printed in full in a special appendix: the two verse letters from Curnow in Christchurch to Glover in England during the war, a verse letter in reply from Glover, and Brasch’s ‘A Paean for Douglas Lilburn’, sent to the composer in a letter and never published. A different kind of illustrative evidence is the rich collection of hundreds of illustrations, of all sizes, including some full-page ones, with more than a hundred paintings and many covers of books and other publications in colour, and photographs of individuals and groups, and of places in black and white. The text and the illustrations work

well together to give a sense of the people, the places, the events (such as plays and exhibitions) the publications (with typography very evident) and the formal works of visual art. There are some interesting examples of collaboration, as in a Landfall page presenting a Basil Dowling poem set out in Bensemann’s calligraphy. Finally, two further related reasons for the success of the book are its inductive, empirical approach and the unpretentious clarity of its prose. Simpson does not bring to his subject any abstract theory about it, but rather searches for and finds a pattern in the particulars. There are no speculative quotations from postmodern or postcolonial theory; there is no ideological hostility to nationalism and realism in the arts in general or to Curnow in particular: and this is refreshing. In an extended interview on Scott Hamilton’s Reading the Maps blogspot in 2010, Simpson, looking at how his socialist politics may colour his criticism, said: ‘I don’t much believe in the value of esoteric criticism. I try to write for the general public and have always aimed at being lucid without oversimplifying the issues.’ In this book he has succeeded in that aim with a comprehensive, well-illustrated, fully researched and readable synthesis of some of his long-time research interests. It is a definitive study of a significant period in the development of a New Zealand high culture.

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FICTION

A Surprise Win by Vaughan Rapatahana

Coming Rain, by Stephen Daisley (Text Publishing, 2015), 320pp, $37

I became quickly involved in this novel. It carries a reader along on its propulsive surge. It won for its Aotearoa New Zealand author, Stephen Daisley, the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book award of $50,000, which is a bit strange in that, as Daisley admits, ‘The only New Zealand thing about Coming Rain, which is set in Australia, is me.’ As Mark Broatch recently also noted in the Listener, ‘The win might be regarded in some quarters as controversial, Daisley being a New Zealand expat who writes about Australia for an Australian publisher and who won the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his last novel, Traitor.’ I do not begrudge him his success—in fact, good on yer, mate—even though the novel has absolutely nothing to do with Aotearoa in terms of setting, characterisation, ambience. But, for me also, other novels up for the award were more ‘deserving’. What do I mean by that? Not ‘deserving’ because other novels are more New Zealand in focus, but because Coming Rain, although well written much of the time, is not well written enough. I

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will come back to this point later on. Daisley certainly captures the desolation and bleakness of the mid1950s Western Australian countryside especially well and one feels the enervating climate, the suffocating dust, the sheer physicality, while snapshots of the farm life are most particularly developed via his earnest tabulations of agrarian paraphernalia. Take as just one instance his visceral depiction of the abandoned goldmining settlement of Thompson’s Find: A corrugated-iron roof had collapsed onto the ground and fallen to one side. Two large rusting wheels with metal poles through their axles. More sheets of corrugated iron at awkward angles in the ruin. The site was covered in the rubble of bricks and masonry. A dead thorn tree with galvanized metal piping.

The chapters are short and taut, their sentences tight. Daisley employs simple prose, but concise, active, earthy. He has to have read a lot of Hemingway, I reckon—for there’s the similar rim shot whack reverberating throughout the prose, whereby emotions and adjectives are secondary to masculine tropes and active verbs—and an overload of pronouns. I also get flashbacks to Barry Crump in the good-keen-manism. This is a brutal, violent story, yet with patches of tenderness, most especially when Daisley depicts nature. In fact the author has a rather romantic affair with his minutely detailed surrounds, rather than his personages, who fail to evoke much sympathy, much empathy, from me. But this softness is generally subsumed

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beneath a steady macho drumbeat, where men make do as best they can in a godless environment under a steady coruscating sun—until the rains come. Stoicism rules in Daisley’s regimented world, it’s his bedrock. His landscape is a Spinoza-like disavowal of the unruliness of passions, as in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. He also reminds me of Steinbeck’s tales—such as Of Mice and Men—of mateship between white males. His primary characters—most especially Painter, the gnarled treestump hardman, who mentors the young protagonist Lew paternally and pugnaciously—are very well drawn. Painter exudes the perspiring earth, the myriad sheep, the sheer geology of his fallen surrounds. I use ‘fallen’ deliberately here, as the text has a distinct tone of Old Testament moralisation and patriarchal prate and it is no minor ploy to have Painter’s crucifixion tattoo and his consistent evoking of  Jesus splattered about the text. It’s like everyone is mired in a sort of original-sin cycle, where there is a panoply of fractured men fighting their own inner demons: Dingo Smith being another gerontin gone gila gila—mad in Malay. Lew is the orphaned young learner, the son substitute, building himself into being throughout Daisley’s Bildungsroman. He is hungry and virile: voracious for substance in his life. Lew seeks some sort of redemption, some sort of existential expiation for his own initial abandonment, his broken

upbringing and the manifest classism of which he is the continued victim, from the first episode at Cottesloe Beach through to his later expulsion by the distinctly oddball landholder. It is his love–hate relationship with Painter, as well as the graphic depiction of earth, winds and fires, that is the guts of this book. Daisley has inhaled these fellows’ lives, conflicts and tribulations; he’s writing his own blood, sweat and tears into the pages. But to me, no other character comes as close to fullness here, except maybe the similarly starving dingo bitch— herself mentoring a young buck sonsire—whose saga is interpolated consistently throughout the episodes unravelling on the farm. Namely, Daybreak Springs, a sheep station owned by another rather under-drawn and riven man, John Drysdale. Bereft of his deceased wife, he is constantly plying white balm to his scarred and burned countenance, as a sort of salve to the exigencies of his surrounds and his fractured mental state. Then there’s his sprightly but too lightly traced daughter, Clara, the only female character with any sort of star rating in a book that goes beyond downplaying women into a distinctly anti-female gambit, most especially via the copious misogynistic ramblings of Painter. He is the fount of these antiwomen rants throughout and one gets the distinct impression he blames the fairer sex, in fact the sexual act in general, as the root cause of entropy and

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evil, as the schism-maker between men. Lew, for example, asks him: ‘You ever been in love, mate?’ ‘I been in love,’ [Painter] said …’ ‘Any good?’ Painter wiped his mouth and face. Sniffed. His hands touching his pockets, searching for his tobacco tin. ‘No.’

And much later he iterates, ‘Never trust a woman, son, they’ll break your heart.’ Jimmy Wong, the Malay Chinese aidede-camp, is more a composite caricature than a coherent character, and—rather like them banished ‘blackfellas’, as well as a quip about Abdul and Wahid and the camels early on—is solely a racist stereotype. Echoes of Steinbeck’s stratification of ethnicities and gender again. By the ending—itself far too compressed and underdeveloped—I have grown tired of the dingo: what begins and continues as a sort of chorus plot propellant, sometimes running parallel, sometimes converging directly with the primary plotline, becomes tedious for me, so her sudden and rather odd demise is somewhat cathartic. It is the last section of the book that worries me: in his impelling towards climax and denouement, Daisley seems almost to feel he had to end the action quickly. Everything speeds up and is undernourished as regards explanation, evidence, exposition: compression is king. The brilliant dingo survivor succumbs to a bullet when nurturing her pups, which surely she should have

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anticipated, given her earlier survival genius: She did not see the features of the young man. She had not heard him, smelled him. She did not hear the shots.

Hard to believe. Why exactly Lew so desperately wants her pups is scantily delineated, most especially since he ignores Dingo Smith—in one of his more cogent spells—when the latter points out to the youth: Dingos, you see what they do to a birthing ewe? The lambs? … No good. Eat a lamb right out of the mother as it’s being born … Best just clean ’em up … Best to destroy them.

Is the young man that love-struck (given that his mature mentor would have described his lust affliction far more crudely)? Painter’s demise is swift and at several removes from the action. He dies of cancer, literally and emphatically shrinking away from the main plotline in which he had been the crux and then saviour. Jimmy the Malay Chinese cookcum-steward’s flimsy rationale for betraying Clara just doesn’t gel, while Drysdale’s running amok with the gun also bursts through the pages like a meteorite from another tome altogether. Dingo Smith conveniently dances with— not wolves but a goat, in his onrush of war horrors, just when Lew is around looking for the dingo pups. This rush to the tape is all a bit perplexing, for Daisley has obviously put so much into his mahi here. Surely a bit more detail, a tad more unravelling of the torrent of human

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disintegration, could have been mounted? Lew and Clara will become lovers— finally—and somehow domesticate wild dogs. We surmise they will live happily ever after their conjoint rites of passage, in a sort of fairytale soap-opera happy ending, albeit with a weird totemistic twist. For at the end the story reminds me of something from esoteric mythology and traditional tales of folk who run as lycanthropes. Clara loses her own dogs, grotesquely massacred by her crazed paterfamilias, and is gifted the brood of ready replacement dingos in their stead. And Lew has already slain the young male dingo … it’s all a rather symmetrical intertwining of beasts and human beings. And let’s not forget Painter’s acerbic lines: ‘You ever seen a woman having a baby? … Fucking mess. All over the bloody bed and floor, shit everywhere. Like an animal they are.’

Ultimately, the feral anthropomorph has more sway—for it is the dingo bitch who births progenies, not the virginal Clara, herself in the throes of  Zorro, the menstrual cycle as titled by the author. Here’s an author who seems more captivated by the terrestrial than the transcendent, the taciturn than the talkative, in a world where women seem tarred as temptresses, such as Maureen the war widow and Clara herself. Or as battle-scarred domestic victims who give their kids away, like Lew’s own mother. But—again—this quickfire raffle finish doesn’t do justice to the steady and

excellent construction of the action and aridity the author has earlier on dug deep into the foundation soil of Coming Rain. I seem to have moaned a bit about the book, but it is not my intention to disparage Stephen Daisley and his Painter-like efforts: the man is deserving of accolades and awards for the sheer fact of having to labour for years without funding and as a recipient of myriad rejection slips. As he says, ‘I had to learn persistence, how to fail better … I had to learn to wait, to show up every morning at my desk to believe, to keep going regardless …’ Daisley had been in a drought of his own for eons. Yet, ultimately, I think Chappy by Patricia Grace (another title shortlisted for the Ockham Award) is a more ‘deserving’ novel. Daisley says himself in an interview with Sue Reidy in New Zealand Author that he’s been a long-time admirer of Patricia Grace’s fiction, ‘her authentic voice’. Not mainly because Grace is an indigenous New Zealander and has been writing so well for years on Aotearoa themes, but because her novel is superior in terms of rounder characters and a more careful crafting. Coming Rain falls away a bit, rather like a jigsaw missing the last few pieces, and the overall portrait fades on closer inspection, where you see the gaps. Daisley gives us his committed theme of resolute, if not resigned, masculine survival, with only a glimmer of hope for more, as there is no guarantee the youthful lovers will flourish in a rapidly

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modernising Outback; remembering also my earlier point about the distrust of emoted motivation. But thematic commitment also necessarily embraces style, a skillset that lifts any essential message up and over the prosaic. His was indeed a ‘surprise win’. However, I believe Daisley will graft and craft more definitively with his next novel, for he has the skills, he has the stories, he is a stalwart. Puraho māku, kei ngaure o mahi [To capture fish, you have to put your basket into the water.] The fictive deluge will follow. The portentous stormclouds—rather like the sultry, oppressive broods countenancing much of this book, before they rip asunder into madness and mayhem and massive downpours—are already gathered. Kia ora e hoa.

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FICTION

A Plenitude of Themes by Michael Morrissey

The Antipodeans, by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, 2015), 352pp, $38

Greg McGee has had a variegated and successful career: first as a playwright, then as a TV writer, then as a crime novel writer writing as Alix Bosco, and now as the author of  The Antipodeans, an historical novel that almost enters the present day. This accomplished and confident work is a complex exploration of the double narrative. Two well-known examples of the double-narrative novel are The Collector by John Fowles and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The question that inevitably teases the reader’s mind is, when will the two narratives meet or overlap? In the case of The Collector they are contiguous, for the kidnapper and the kidnappee are together nearly all the time. The dissonant ‘parallel’ is their widely separate consciousnesses. In the more complex Anna Karenina we are exposed to a rich substratum of high Russian society where unhappily married Anna Karenina and athletic rural Levin never meet, as much as we would like them to. To summarise: the complexity and sweep of Anna Karenina derives from Tolstoy’s use of the double plot.

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Every double or dual narrative sets its own coordinates and The Antipodeans is no exception. It begins by evoking that most romantic of cities, Venice: ‘He insisted they take a boat, Alilaguna, so that her first view of Venice would be from the water.’ This is father Bruce Spence thinking of daughter Clare. On my own visit to Venice, some three decades ago, I arrived by train along a thin connecting strip of land. I now wish I had had the chance to read McGee’s novel to persuade me of the more authentic approach. The literature of  Venice is extensive and most of it explores the dazzle that opulent city presents to the senses. But only American author John Berendt in The City of Falling Angels had the genius to write a book that devoted its pages to actual Venetians rather than the city’s majestic façades. The literature of  Venice is dominated by stunned observers who are trying to render its magic in their own prose. Fiction, by contrast, has had a smaller bite of the sumptuous Venetian cake, but McGee’s prose is dazzling enough to foot it with the best: Venice was an illustration from a fairy tale, the unimaginably ancient and detailed facades of the palazzo, lit to show their Byzantine bones, seeming to float just above their reflection on the water. Between some of the grand houses, other smaller lanes of water led off into a gentle rose light thrown by lanterns, danced through by the drizzle.

The brilliance of McGee here is to throw the word ‘bones’ with its hard sound and focus into the middle of a passage that otherwise uses ‘soft’ language. The scene shifts to wartime Italy with

Harry Spence and Joe Lamont as the main protagonists. What are two New Zealanders doing in Italy in 1942? They are not sightseeing in Venice: they are fighting the Italians, in particular the Italian fascists in Bari, a southern town. The war scenes are expertly done throughout and always gripping. War is full of mistakes and one such occurs when the New Zealanders are awaiting the arrival of British tanks that never come, while the German Panzers arrive in force. The German tanks are so close that the sound of their guns going off is almost unbearable: But when those Panzers opened up with their big barrels so close his ears popped with the shock waves of air from the shells as they hit the rock and fragmented and went right through flesh and blood and metal.

In a later chapter the seemingly invincible Tiger tanks are taken out by a shell going through a weld seam. Telling detail! Harry has fought in many campaigns around the Mediterranean rim and, having acquired the ruthless authority of a seasoned war veteran, he can kill the enemy with a cheerful sangfroid Joe has never acquired. Curiously, and at times improbably, he is the master of disguise, turning up when least expected and not always recognised by Joe. A sample description of his multifarious gear: ‘a Wehrmacht tunic, the knee-length breeches he had taken from the Slovenians, with lederhosen borrowed from Marissa’s uncle in the Brennero, and a dead stormtrooper’s boots’.

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Despite the dominance of Harry, the human killing machine, it is Joe who emerges most strongly as a character. Harry may be a more vivid sort of wartime James Bond, but there is certain shallowness to him, while Joe is more likeably human and has stronger local roots in his native land of New Zealand. The first strand of the narrative moves to the relatively little-known town of Treviso which, like Venice, has water in its streets but lacks the grandeur of the latter. And local stocky Renzo courts Clare with exhaustive lectures about quantum mechanics. It seems that many women have had to endure boring ‘raves’ from men who actually have another agenda in mind. Renzo used to play rugby football (but more of that presently). Harry and Joe spend a great deal of time on the run, in disguise, fearing that if they have to speak, their not being Italian will give them away. They are welcomed by partisans, betrayed by a priest, and always on the run. This relentless helter-skelter pace keeps the second narrative strand constantly alive. About halfway through, the novel sets in motion its third strand. This is Bruce Spence typing on a quirky typewriter that has some of its letters mixed up. Every subject under the sun is covered in a flood of memories and a stream of consciousness technique, but there’s also quite a lot to do with rugby football. Not all, but some fifty per cent of McGee’s work has had rugby as a theme. He was a keen rugby player in his day and played and coached in Italy. When international rugby is played in 172

New Zealand a strange fever equivalent to an amphitheatre frenzy takes hold of the psyche of the nation. For those in its grip it is a willing submission, while those who prefer other sports or art can only shake their heads in disbelief. Regrettably, I am among non-rugby enthusiasts, so when rugby enters the text I start switching off. It’s not easy to make a sport interesting to those who lack enthusiasm for it, though Lionel Shriver managed it in Double Fault, which is about tennis ratings. Perhaps all such sportsorientated novels are more for the faithful than the non-believer. It would be a cheap shot, however, to say that this is a sports novel or a rugby novel—it is not. Nor is it a war novel. Rather than being a genre novel, it has a big canvas that covers those themes and many more besides. Although it starts off with relative simplicity, it soon becomes a very complex book as it explores family issues in depth, making every page rich with detail. The war segment is full of accounts of numerous Italian partisans, and also includes the character Arch Scott, who was an actual war hero who helped guide many New Zealanders through German-occupied Italy and who survived the sinking of a torpedoed ship in which hundreds died. And, wait for it, yes … he was a rugby coach. Good on yer, mate! All in all, this is a highly successful novel with many passages of great lyric beauty and explores such a plenitude of themes that it could be said there is something for everyone. It deserves, and should get, the widest readership.

FICTION

A dark and suspenseful story by Christopher Ward-Greene

Love as a Stranger, by Owen Marshall (Random House New Zealand Vintage, 2016), 290pp, $38

Tolstoy suggested that unhappy families are uniquely unhappy. Owen Marshall, in his latest novel, Love as a Stranger, shows how unhappy marriages suffer in their own specific fashion—with unexpected consequences. Sarah, a sort of Kiwi every-woman in her late fifties, is the fulcrum upon which the story revolves. She and her husband Robert rent a tiny apartment in Auckland’s inner city while he receives cancer treatment. The increasingly narrowed horizon of their domestic life and the boredom it entails set her on a path of greater independence, but with independence comes a new kind of entanglement. Sarah first encounters Hartley at the grave of a young woman who was shot in 1886 on her way to church. This rather morbid beginning sets up the gothic atmosphere of the novel. It is almost as if Marshall has transported a nineteenthcentury sensibility into a twenty-firstcentury setting. This sense of menace—

as well as the underlying sense of the tragic in everyday life—pervades the novel. Hartley is a ‘lean man in a quality dark suit’, but his yellow and white sneakers lend a ‘touch of incongruity’. He is indeed an altogether incongruous figure: successful, yet lacking in contentment; confident in his working life but insecure in his personal relationships. There is a quiet air of desperation about his character, which becomes more apparent as the novel unfolds. Their respective wanderings and chance meetings lead Sarah and Hartley to forge a firm friendship. Hartley, whose semi-retirement from a law firm allows him to assume the role of Auckland flanneur, is smitten with Sarah. A widower whose son lives in England, Hartley marvels at this new opportunity that has come his way: ‘Chance had favoured him and its touch was pleasing.’ And yet nothing is ever as it seems. It is soon revealed that Hartley contrived their ‘chance’ meetings: As Hartley watched Sarah walk towards her home he was glad that, after she’d left the gallery days before, he’d followed at a distance, aware of an almost cinematic element of espionage that he half indulged, yet endeavoured to suppress, until he saw her reach her apartment.

The gaze, voyeurism and the photographic image become recurring symbols in the novel. The idea of possession features strongly in Hartley’s psyche, but so does the need to have the gaze turned upon oneself and to be

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recognised and acknowledged, something that the philosopher Hegel knew lay at the core of human nature. Here is Hartley at his narcissistic worst: The photo was great though. He brought it up again and again on the computer and there was Sarah at the café table, smiling, at him. At him. That was all he needed for the future.

In fact Hartley requires a lot more for the future—and of the future—than it is willing to give him. His character, disconcerting as it is, reveals some deeper human desire to control the world. It is surely the loss of control—the control over one’s emotions—that provides the surest path to madness. Marshall, ever the master of character, creates a sympathetic duo in Sarah and Hartley, and a good deal of scorn is reserved for the ineffectual Robert. He is the least likeable of the three protagonists, one of those vapid Kiwi archetypes who commonly appear in Marshall’s fiction. As Sarah and Hartley begin their affair, Hartley’s passionate love-making is contrasted with Robert’s clumsy attempts to flatter his wife: As a young woman she had often worn shorts, or jeans, but now she considered that her legs had become too thick. Once, as he stroked them, Robert had told her that she had thighs like a wild mare. She supposed he intended it as a compliment.

Hartley’s romantic overtures contrast sharply with Robert’s increasing solipsism and this allows Sarah to enter more deeply into the affair: ‘Only moralistic convention insists that love for one person excludes love for another.’ 174

While Robert sorts through a box of family photographs, his existence is increasingly consigned to the past, his life the stuff of memories. Susan Sontag wrote of the strangeness and imprisoning quality of the photographic image. She suggested that photographs were a kind of memento mori that consigned the subject to a celluloid death. Robert, obsessed with the documentary evidence of his past life, becomes a ghost in the present one and, in doing so, makes himself irrelevant. The narrative switches deftly between Sarah and Hartley’s thought processes, the latter displaying a darker and more obsessive wish that Robert would succumb to his illness: ‘What would be a socially acceptable time before Sarah could remarry? A year? And even during that time he could find ways to be with her.’ Sarah is thus caught between two needy men: her increasingly dependent and maudlin husband, and a man who would do anything to please her. While Hartley lavishes affection on Sarah and surprises her with day trips and gifts, his expectations of their relationship increase. This precipitates Sarah’s decision to curtail their contact, and eventually she ends the affair. Marshall winds the suspense up a notch as Hartley’s affection is transformed into increasingly confronting behaviour. Marshall has often made outsiders and misfits the focus of his fiction, and the tragedy of the story lies in Hartley’s lamentable character:

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‘I’ve always been lonely.’ It was only when he said it that Hartley acknowledged it to himself. Yes, he’d been lonely amid the noise and activity of his Southland family, lonely when he came north, still lonely in his marriage and even after his son was born. He’d been lonely all his life and never got used to it, never understood that it was the reason for enduring dissatisfaction, until meeting Sarah.

However, in a story that throws up a good deal of moral ambiguity, some share of the blame must be apportioned to Sarah, whose escapist tendencies allow her to enter into an affair that she is never fully committed to: ‘There are good dreams, though,’ Sarah said, and although he didn’t reply he squeezed her hand. Both knew they shared the idea that what they had was a dream. You woke from dreams, though, Sarah thought, but she didn’t want to start in on that.

It is in part Sarah’s dishonesty that allows events to spiral out of control. She could be accused of giving Hartley false hope. Nonetheless, it is his impulsive behaviour that spells the end of their brief relationship: ‘Sarah felt angry with Hartley, but also concerned for him. He was changing, mutating in some disturbing way from the man she loved.’ The novel’s premise rests upon the idea that love is, by its very nature, obsessive, and takes its epigraph from a quote by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, ‘When love is not madness, it is not love.’ One suspects that it is not so much love that brings Sarah and Hartley together as narcissism—or, at the very least, desperation and loneliness.

Love as a Stranger is quite possibly Marshall’s best novel to date. In its pathos and in the chilling reminder of the lengths that people will go to for love—or what they assume love to be— he has created a dark and suspenseful story. Auckland is masterfully rendered, with its storms and sudden downpours, its bush-clad suburbs, teeming streets and ubiquitous cafes, but most importantly in its sense of anonymity and loneliness. Marshall’s stories often describe the intersection between character and setting, showing us how a person is more often than not a product of their environment. In the character of Hartley, whose personality has been shaped by a lonely Southland childhood and the bustling corporate world of Auckland, he has created a character of great interest and credibility. The novel signals Marshall’s increasing movement away from his former territory—that of the rural and small-town landscape—towards the metropolis, but it loses nothing of Marshall’s acute appreciation of contemporary Kiwi life. There is always a sense of repressed futility amidst the characters of his fiction, a sense that life is elsewhere, or that is has passed them by. This quality lends great pathos to his work and is something he shares with one of his acknowledged literary forerunners, John Cheever, as well as the ‘dirty realist’ writers Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. The sinister and menacing tone of the novel can be compared with the likes of Ian McEwan’s

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The Comfort of Strangers, Enduring Love and Saturday, as Marshall navigates increasingly darker psychological territory. If there is one criticism of the novel it is that Robert’s character has a muted quality, reducing him at times to a mere prop. While there is plenty of psychological insight into the characters of Sarah and Hartley, Robert is often reduced to a bit player. Sarah, on the other hand, is a very convincing female protagonist and here Marshall’s powers of perception are consistently on show. Ultimately, Love as a Stranger forces us to confront the very idea of love and what it means to those who are swept up in its giddy embrace. As Frank Sargeson once wrote in a very different kind of story, ‘a great love can be both a very beautiful but also a very terrible thing.’

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POETRY

Troubadours and Echoes by James Norcliffe

Beside Herself, by Chris Price (Auckland University Press, 2016), 120pp, $25; Fits and Starts, by Andrew Johnston (Victoria University Press, 2016), 86pp, $25

Beside Herself is a clever title, hinting at once at emotional response, as well as otherness, at the additional. These latter connotations are especially appropriate given the proportion of poems focusing on the other and on a number of persona poems: the poet as biographer and the poet as actor. The collection’s keystone is the long sequence ‘The Book of Churl’, which brings to life, in twenty-three poems, a medieval peasant, half Caliban, half Everyman. This elemental creation, churlish as his name implies, brings to mind other misanthropic, grumpy creatures such as Vincent O’Sullivan’s Butcher or Ted Hughes’ Crow. The sequence begins: ‘Churl stamps through the swamp …’ and ends, referencing Lear on the heath: ‘… the poor forked creature rides/ the white horse up the hill/ and down again.’ The horse, we have been told earlier, is not of course a real horse—such trappings of wealth and class are denied Churl, but a horse such as the White Horse of

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Uffingham, a chalk design on a hillside. The language of the poems in between tends towards Anglo Saxon basic, largely avoiding latinate vocabulary: scowl, mud, stomps, kine, kin, grumble, curse, kick, from the first poem alone. One of the pleasures for a writer is to light upon an original subject and appropriate language to exploit and explore; Chris Price seems to relish the opportunity Churl has given her and a sneaking affection for him comes through. He is downtrodden, of course, given the constraints of his time, his being an outcast, prone to outbursts and violence, prone too to having violence inflicted on him. He lives among cattle ‘where even his damp fire/ wants to smoke him out’, nursing grudges, memories of curses and kicks, lusting after the ‘shaggy blacksmith’s wife’ and entertaining thoughts of reaching ‘for a length of rope then/ tie[ing] the knot of reason/ to twist it round the nearest throat’. Had he a coat of arms, his emblem, we are told, would be a donkey, a stubborn beast of burden. Chris Price is pitch-perfect in her evocation of Churl’s world. Here he is at night after being fobbed off again by the blacksmith’s wife in the seventh poem in the sequence: … at night when a moony finger pries through the straw to touch him where it hurts, he opens one eye. Stop yer lookin he mutters to her callous cousin the lidless watcher in the sky.

The chiming near-rhymes of opens/ lookin/ cousin and the perfect adjectives

moony and lidless are typical of the poet’s deftness of touch and skill, a deftness that makes reading Beside Herself such a pleasure. Above all, it is the man Churl who is the focus of Price’s imagination, his inner and his outer world, the historical and political setting not so important. Traditionally, a churl was a freeman at the bottom of the heap. Thus in one poem Churl is wanted for ‘a game of soldiers’, but for the most part Churl is galloped over ‘like a chair/ back flattened, legs in air’, far from the ‘velvetantlered life of courtiers and kings’ in the world before troubadours. And yet, while he is so close to the soil, he is also close to the stars (‘the glittering/ bear in the sky’), and in the final sections of the poem there is more than a hint of shared humanity and a suggestion of love, the love antedating courtliness, ‘outside poetry’. Beside Herself is a generous selection and, in addition to the Churl sequence, features a number of others, sometimes only loosely connected by a common prompt: ‘Paternity Test’, a dark exercise exploring the male psyche; ‘Three Readers in the Jardin du Palais Luxembourg’, witty pieces that so inhabit their subjects they might almost be persona poems; ‘Museum Pieces’, a group of poems prompted by various galleries and museums mainly in France or Italy, although the first, ‘Feathers, bones, beaks and feet’, acknowledges both the National Library of New Zealand and the Museum of Natural History,

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Oxford, and gives voice to a bird in an exhibit drawer. It has a monitory, astringent flavour: … Someone out there is resurrecting viruses from the Pleistocene, and one day, surely useless beauty too will stage its comeback: bigger, better, cosseted, and harbouring one vengeful and unseen disease preserved and nurtured for millennia by my unforgetting halfsisters, the harpies

The remaining sequence, ‘Beside Yourself ’, gives the book its title (slightly altered). Beginning appropriately in the second person, it is a compelling set posing questions about the objectivity/ subjectivity split and teasing out the ambiguities of the title. When it shifts into the first person the effect is striking: Children of the world be glad— of all the parents in the world you might have had I was not one. None of you had to be mine …

Were it not for the open-eyed quality of these poems, they might have at times seemed self-pitying. Instead they express that emotive connotation of the Beside Yourself dichotomy as the poet struggles with her existential dilemma. Part of one section could well be the tonic chord, not just for this sequence, but for the whole book: she’s always the last to know first person uncool second person a disguise for the first, third person

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a costume party thrown by a fool …

The ending of the sequence resonates: turn me out like a spanked kid into the garden turn again and let me in

Beside Herself is a rich collection full of pleasures and surprises, and nicely augmented by selected line drawings of Leo Bensemann. * Andrew Johnston’s sixth collection, Fits and Starts, also has a clever and layered title. Idiomatically, fits and starts of course means a progress marred by much stopping and starting, but we are reminded that fit may also mean, obsoletely, a section of a poem or song, and that start also has an obsolete meaning: ‘a sudden unbroken utterance or sound along with a sudden burst of energy or activity; an outburst of emotion, madness; a flight of humour’. The reference to music is telling, for the lyric impulse is always strong in Andrew Johnston’s work and invariably present in these poems. The book is in three sections: a short opening section, ‘Half Life’, of seven poems, and two long sections. The first of these, ‘Echo in Limbo’, is of twenty-six poems, each named after—and in order—a book of the Old Testament, omitting Daniel and the Minor Prophets. The second, ‘Do You Read Me?’, is also (and obviously) twenty-six poems, each named for a code word in the International Radiotelephony (NATO)

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Spelling Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc). In these sequences Johnston has lit upon an original set of prompts for a sequence, although the relationship between the prompts and the language is in each case a little less clearly defined than in Chris Price’s ‘The Book of Churl’. The poems in the first section are characterised by a sense of gentle melancholy (dark is a key word) leavened by moments of drollery and wordplay. The most powerful of these is ‘Afghanistan’, which, in ten sections, and with repetitions and names of people and places, achieves at times an incantatory evocation of the timelessness of that country’s travails. The unifying thread in ‘Echo in Limbo’ is Echo, who figures throughout the poems. Whereas Churl puts me in mind of Caliban, there is a hint of Ariel in Echo, a being bound by forces beyond herself and reminded constantly of her captivity. There is some sense of cognitive dissonance, of course, in placing a creature from Greek mythology into a construct of medieval theology all framed by the books of the Old Testament, but cognitive dissonance is what Andrew Johnston is often all about. Consider, for example, ‘Proverbs’: Echo’s story exploded the moment the X-ray revealed her missing soul. Life went into reverse: her birth was a curse. She ripped up the script. She hit play. Invisible birds. Unspeakable words. God’s apology. Wisdom as folly: all her mistakes had come true. Her soul hurt because it was missing.

She was a mirror whose fragments tore the light to shreds of sense.

This piece bundles together X-ray machines, video remotes, broken mirrors, paradox and irony. Oh, and music, of course, in the rhyme and halfrhyme. Note also the form: ten lines arranged in couplets, the same form adopted for all of the twenty-six ‘Echo in Limbo’ poems and the twenty-six ‘Do You Read Me?’ poems. This tightness of structure and symmetry plays against the imaginative flights and associations contained within. More generally, the poems in ‘Echo in Limbo’ are allusive, elusive, often teasing like an echo itself, half-heard in the distance. The title of the biblical book sets up one hint; Echo echoes the hint and establishes another. The effect is strange and compelling. In the poem ‘Isaiah’, Johnston takes time out to explain the nature of the sequence in an interview format, offering, as Price does in Beside Yourself, a key to an understanding of the project overall. Why did you choose the particular myth? Because it made the same noise as my myth. Can you describe the sound it produced? It resembled the memory of a memory. And the original recollection, what was that of ? A rustling before memory began. Where does all the stuff about trees come from? Each absent tree cast two shadows. Can you recommend a good book? Can you recommend a good life?

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In the poems in ‘Do You Read Me?’ Johnson lets his hair down and revels much more in playfulness. As the title suggests, these tend to be more personal. Echo, as she must, given the code name for E in the alphabet, appears again, but stays on to feature in two or three more poems. For the most part, though, these poems are jeux d’esprit, full of word play and Stevie Smith-like rhymes. They are very entertaining to read.

HISTORY

These are both rich and rewarding collections. It is good to see poets developing sequences and exploiting a creative idea beyond the confines of a page or two. Walt Whitman once surprisingly claimed that there is no such thing as a long poem. These poets show how this paradox can be resolved in sequences made up of compelling vignettes.

In the early nineteenth century Raumahora, daughter of the chief Rangirarunga, became enamoured of the son of an invading Ngāti Awa chief. Asked by her dying father if she wished to take Takarangi as a husband, she replied, ‘I like him.’ ‘Thence was that war,’ wrote George Grey in 1855, ‘brought to an end.’ Over a century later, in 2014, Wellington Girls’ College student Dawape Giwa-Isekeije organised a march of 270 girls (the number of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted that year by Islamic Jihadist organisation Boko Harem) to urge parliament to bring more pressure on the Nigerian government to return the girls to their families. That distant war was not brought to an end, but the decision of a young woman not to remain silent in the face of injustice echoes across the years. Book-ended by these two events, A History of New Zealand Women by University of Otago historian Barbara Brookes charts a social and political history using a gender-based lens to write, according

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A Woman’s Land by Sally Blundell

A History of New Zealand Women, by Barbara Brookes (Bridget Williams Books, 2016), 554pp, $69.99

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to the book’s promotion material, the ‘first narrative account of this country’s past from the perspective of the women who have lived here’. Brookes is well suited to the task. She has long studied and taught gender relations in New Zealand, most notably in the area of health politics. She has coedited two collections of essays on New Zealand women’s history and, more recently, an international collection called Bodily Subjects: Histories of gender and health. Here, however, she has to plait together two often divergent threads— the story of European women and that of Māori women. This divergence begins in the ancient stories of human creation. According to Māori belief, women were the first humans created by the gods. According to European Christian belief, woman is created from Adam’s rib, a seductive and troublesome afterthought. Such contrasts shape much of the book. Within Māori society the wisdom and skills underpinning notions of mana and whakapapa cut across notions of gender. As prospective wives, women could prevent loss of mana, settle disputes (as seen in the story of Raumahora) and restrict bloodshed. Women shared in labour and warfare; land and important goods could be passed down through the female line. Through lullabies, waiata and weaving they held and relayed the stories of people and place. Women— high-ranking women at least— commanded respect and made decisions on behalf of their groups. As Brookes

writes, ‘Rank rather than gender … may well have been the prime determinant of social roles in tribal society.’ While early whalers and sealers who entered into relationships with Māori women did so on ‘Māori terms’, European settlers brought with them a gender-based system based on male prerogative and authority in the public realm; female influence in the domestic space of home and family. Marriage laws secured the male line in inheritance, and systems of politics were left to men. Colonial encounters privileged these attitudes rather than those of Māori. Mission wives took it upon themselves to influence Māori attitudes to childrearing, literacy and notions of propriety, while successive legislation changed inheritance rights, political engagement and systems of property to adhere more closely to European values. ‘Just as British women were under coverture, submerged in the legal identity of their husbands,’ writes Brookes, ‘so Māori living under customary law lost legal identity in return for the Crown’s protection.’ From this early contact period Brookes tracks a story of rapid societal changes and the fight for more rights and political representation for women. As a result of land confiscations, many Māori women sought work as shearers, gum diggers, tourist guides and goldminers. Some established their own trading operations in flax, fish, potatoes, maize, wheat and firewood. Settler life also prompted a change in

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the lives of European women. Shedding the socially prescribed roles of ‘home’, they worked as farmers, teachers, nurses, business entrepreneurs. Brookes describes educated middle-class woman Mary Taylor, who left behind England’s rigid class system to buy land, build a house and trade in cattle in her new home. As she wrote in 1857, ‘It is the difference between everything being a burden and everything being more or less a pleasure.’ For many women that pleasure was tempered by hard domestic work, multiple pregnancies and maternal death. Groups such as the Auckland Ladies’ Benevolent Society were formed to look after destitute women and children and lobby for better protection for young women lured to the city in search of work. From 1885 the Women’s Christian Temperance Union urged women to stand for local body elections, school committees, liquor licensing committees and hospital and charitable aid boards. As Brookes says, temperance was the ‘international lightning rod’ that drew women together for political action and gave a platform from which to lobby for the vote. There were milestones: in 1873 factory work was restricted to eight hours a day (although no such protection was given to laundresses and seamstresses). In 1877 Kate Milligan Edger became the first woman to graduate from the University of  New Zealand—as the New Zealand Herald wrote at the time, ‘Let us

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hear no more of the intellectual inferiority of women.’ In 1893, years of campaigning came to an end when women’s right to vote was finally enshrined in law. Increasingly, we find women of both ethnicities leading the charge for change: Anna Stout, wife of Premier Robert Stout; Te Puea, grand-daughter of King Tāwhiao and leader of the Kīngitanga movement; Miria Pomare, co-founder of the Ngāti Poneke Māori Association and the first New Zealand woman to receive an OBE—all envisaged a future where women and girls could live safely and independently. In meeting the demands of a depleted workforce during two world wars, women renewed their calls for better pay, more equitable divorce and property laws, parliamentary representation, safe sex and better maternity and antenatal care (in 1921 the maternal death rate for European women in New Zealand was the second highest in the western world). For Māori, the most pressing concerns pivoted on health, schooling and the education of the Māori leaders of the future. In both instances the reverberation of war continued to echo through civilian society. The aftermath of  World War II saw a period of rapid change: more jobs, higher hemlines, shorter hair and the spread of early childhood care services such as Playcentre and kindergarten. Brookes charts these changes with a wide societal brush—growing housing demand, overcrowding, suburban

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isolation (40 million doses of  Valium were prescribed by New Zealand doctors in 1969), rapid urbanisation, rural poverty and growing participation by women in the workforce. While women writers, artists and filmmakers used their artforms to map a distinctly New Zealand identity, an imported youth culture crashed into New Zealand’s placid conservatism with a wave of new music, fashion and sex. A government committee was established to report on moral delinquency in children and young people; psychologists and magazine columnists dished out parenting advice. The advent of the contraceptive pill in 1961 raised further alarms, but for the first time women were able to delay childbirth and invest in education and career training. The fight for women’s rights became subsumed by other protest movements over the 1970s and 80s: anti-apartheid movements, Vietnam War protests, abortion law-reform campaigns, and those for Māori sovereignty and gay rights. Domestic violence, sexual harassment, equal pay, women’s health and the plight of single parents became the platforms on which a new generation of women demanded change. Māori and Pacific women were also organising under the leadership of Eva Rickard, Annette Sykes, Donna Awatere and Ripeka Evans. The image of Whina Cooper’s bent back during the 1975 land march became a symbol for a new phase of Māori activism. Mira Szaszy, former

president of the Māori Women’s Welfare League, said: ‘We were like the crippled members of the children’s group who followed the Pied Piper of Hamlin. We were being left behind. Pākehā women were being led to the mountain top while we were still picking ourselves up to start walking.’ In 2001 the New Statesman described New Zealand as ‘a woman’s land’: we had a woman prime minister (Helen Clark), and a woman governor-general (Silvia Cartwright), attorney-general (Margaret Wilson) and chief justice (Sean Elias). It seemed a point of arrival, a culmination of over a century of pressure and protest, but Brookes aligns these markers with the political and economic forces that were to undermine the state’s role in the welfare and prosperity of the country. The language of free choice, she writes, could quickly be detached from its feminist moorings and become associated with ‘individualistic, marketlike behaviour’. This is a tenuous argument. The language of choice promoted by feminist movements was not the same as the language of individual responsibility used to promote the neoliberal goals of Roger Douglas and subsequent governments. Indeed, social justice remains a touchstone for many women’s groups and activities. This aside, A History of New Zealand Women provides an important and comprehensive perspective on our collective history. From Raumahora to Giwa-Isekeije, Brookes charts the issues

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that shaped the lives of women and New Zealand society as a whole: property rights, suffrage, fertility and reproduction, political representation, economic and social equality and domestic and street violence. The prose is clear, the breadth extensive. But the presentation of the research is not uniform: early accounts of Māori are largely (and understandably) dependent on the reports of European settlers and explorers; where the personal lives and challenges of early women settlers are well documented through private letters, later events and trends are portrayed through more public accounts, a result perhaps of the book’s later focus on women in positions of power or protest. This is a pity—the story of characters such as spinster sisters Martha and Maria King, arriving in Wellington in 1840 with their brother and opening schools in Whanganui (spelled here Wanganui) and New Plymouth, presents a compelling intimacy. This discrepancy, however, is balanced by the excellent range of photography, giving visual form to the history of arts and crafts as well as the more intimate depictions of women’s daily lives since the middle of the last century. In her book Brookes poses a question: how does our vision of the past change if we put women at the centre of the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand? It is a provocative if open-ended question, perhaps demanding a detailed comparison with previous histories.

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Certainly the landmark events and many personalities will be familiar to the general reader, but the importance of this book is not, as the title suggests, as a history of  New Zealand women. Rather it lies in Brookes’ ability to provide a female perspective on a history shared by men and women, Māori and Pākehā. It is from this standpoint that Brookes presents a history that privileges the issues and trends that inspired women’s concerns, creativity, protest and accomplishments and that, as the writer says in her brief conclusion to the book, will continue to challenge younger, more ethnically diverse generations of New Zealand women.

HISTORY

Mana and Tapu by Edmund Bohan

Outcasts of the Gods: The struggle over slavery in Māori New Zealand, by Hazel Petrie (Auckland University Press, 2015), 384pp, $45; Ka Ngaro Te Reo: Māori language under siege in the nineteenth century, by Paul Moon (Otago University Press, 2016), 336pp, $39.95

Both these books, for all their differences in form and style, are to be warmly welcomed as significant additions to the growing literature on nineteenth-century Māori society and culture, so essential not only for our knowledge of that period, but for our understanding of the tortuous evolution of twenty-first-century New Zealand society. A major feature of the wide-ranging Māori studies that have proliferated during the past two decades is its formidable standard of scholarship. A new generation of researchers and writers, Pākehā and Māori, has emerged. In marked contrast to previous generations of New Zealand historians, the majority are also invariably fluent in te reo and able to make use of the vast nineteenth-century archival material available in te reo that, until so recently, was closed to researchers without such linguistic knowledge and skill. During

my own work on the political personalities of the 1860s and 1870s, begun sixty years ago, for example, I have often found my inability to read te reo fluently to be frustrating, forcing me to rely instead on often suspiciously flawed translations. Problems of translation were frequently topics of debate in the colonial parliament. Neither Hazel Petrie nor Paul Moon has faced such a problem. Hazel Petrie’s academic work in Māori Studies and her fluency in te reo led to her involvement in the major project of investigating Māori newspapers, which was followed by her acclaimed Chiefs of Industry: Māori tribal enterprise in early colonial New Zealand. Paul Moon, of course, has developed over recent years into one of our major and most widely read historians, producing a succession of well-written books combining impeccable standards of scholarship with another admirable quality shared by all the best historians: the courage to be, on occasions, unapologetically controversial. Petrie’s study of the nature of freedom and ‘unfreedom’ in traditional Māori society is securely based on both Māori oral sources and the colonial written records, but she takes as her starting point a remark of the fictional character Beth Heke in Alan Duff ’s novel Once Were Warriors: ‘Us Maoris used to practise slavery like them poor Negroes had to endure in America …’ It is a useful enough straw man for any thesis writer, and it serves its purpose as she embarks on her detailed analyses of the realities of

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traditional Māori society, and traces the ideological changes brought about by the arrival of traders, missionaries and colonists strongly influenced by the ideals of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century humanitarianism and the anti-slavery movement. After a chapter dealing with skin colour, cosmology, status and both Western and Māori attitudes towards Australian Aborigines and Moriori, she discusses the nature and significance of the concepts of mana and tapu, their loss and the efforts to regain them; the roles, rights and status of war captives, their value and, especially, the impact of muskets. There follows a chapter on Māori, Western and, in particular, missionary attitudes to sex, prostitution and illegitimacy; after which the motives driving the proponents of abolitionism are discussed, along with the establishment of British government, Māori responses to it, and missionary attitudes and ideas of spiritual redemption. Petrie next considers the reasons why captives were released; the work of some freed people, including rangatira, as Christian converts, catechists and teachers; missionaries as peacemakers; and what she describes as Christianity’s ‘war’ on the concepts of mana and tapu. There follow detailed chapters on evolving British attitudes from the Busby era to the Treaty of Waitangi, efforts to protect Māori rights and even the idea of Māori ‘enslavement’ by the British, land loss and the emergence of Kīngitanga.

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The final chapter is on the language of slavery, and there is a short sub-section discussing ideas of political correctness. In short, the author can claim, with some justification, that this is the first comprehensive history of Māori war captives. In any such wide-ranging thematic study some repetition is almost inevitable; unfortunately there is rather too much here and the result is a loss of clarity. Sharper editing might have rectified this. The author has also naturally relied heavily on the vast and valuable writings of the first generation of mariners, sealers, whalers, merchants and, especially, English missionaries— Anglican and Wesleyan—many of whom were poorly educated and intellectually unsophisticated. It would have been interesting to have some idea also of how the admittedly smaller but still significant Roman Catholic missions from Kaipara and Hokianga to Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Waikato and down to Akaroa, viewed Māori cultural practices. Surely those clerical French perspectives might have been worth exploring. Bishop Jean Pompalier—a man of considerable intellect who played a significant part in events at Waitangi and wrote extensively on Māori customs in French, English and Māori itself— does not even rate a mention.

* Paul Moon’s Ka Ngaro te Reo certainly does not suffer from a lack of conciseness, focus or clarity.

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Chronological in structure, it is perhaps one of his most stimulating works to date, a model of broad and sustained scholarship. The bibliography alone occupies nearly 100 of the book’s 322 pages, and Notes a further 55. Moon begins with an analysis of the state of the language in 1800—a thought-provoking chapter concerned also with the very nature of language itself—and each of the next four chapters deals with a decade, Chapter 6 with the 1870s to the 1890s, while the last surveys the state of te reo in 1899. From the outset, Moon stresses the significance of Māori as an oral language in which the spoken word resonated with a spiritual significance not immediately apparent to the colonisers. Thus, as he persuasively observes, from the outset the Treaty of Waitangi was ‘likely to have had a tenor of sanctity’. He then identifies three main themes in his study: firstly, that the appearance of Europeans in the late eighteenth century, and especially the impact of British colonisation, precipitated a breakdown in the use of te reo as settler society pursued its grand aim of civilising Māori. Secondly, the way in which colonists themselves used te reo: not simply by learning it and speaking it, but by translating English publications and maintaining its presence in church, native schools and branches of government—all of which, Moon asserts, ‘ironically reinforced rather than undermined the coloniser’s assault on te reo’. He identifies, thirdly, the

effectiveness of successive governments in eroding te reo and argues that although these ‘largely avoided formal efforts to ban the language outright … they put in place more subtle and definitely more effective measures to squeeze out the indigenous language and supplant it with that of the coloniser’. He quotes Sir James Henare’s assertion to the Waitangi Tribunal in 1985 that, while there was no official policy in the nineteenth century to outlaw te reo, there was instead a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. As Moon puts it: ‘An almost innate European aversion to te reo made it unnecessary to legislate prohibition against the language: cultural and social pressures were a far more practical means of evisceration.’ Moon writes perceptively on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European intellectual ideas of cultural and racial superiority, and the significance later of the pervasive theories of social Darwinism which scarred so much later nineteenth-century opinion. We must not forget that those ideas were not confined to New Zealand or Britain, where, for example, the traditional cultures and languages of the Welsh, Cornish and especially the Irish and Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots (many of whom were to become New Zealand colonists) were so often condemned as not just inferior in every way to all things English, but barbaric. These were also the years during which Lord Macaulay established the primacy of English in all aspects of

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Indian education and public administration. But, unlike some previous historians, Moon does not underplay the role Māori themselves played in the changes that took place, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century as te reo gradually ceased to be New Zealand’s predominant language and the European population came to exceed the indigenous race. The spread of Māori literacy, firstly in te reo and gradually in English, was a major feature of that first half-century, when Māori and European interaction steadily extended into most aspects of commercial, social and, eventually, political life. Māori were capable and enthusiastic traders, and they were, as most of the first generation of young settler politicians quickly discovered, eager debaters: such leaders as Edward Stafford and William Fox frequently and approvingly observed that Māori were natural politicians. So Māori literacy advanced not because it was imposed or obligatory but because Māori found it necessary, and they embraced it enthusiastically—as shown by the proliferation of Māori-language newspapers and their own new habits of letter-writing. Accordingly, te reo itself underwent changes because language, as Moon emphasises, is not merely a communication but a culture-shaper— socially and politically. Any introduced language of instruction inevitably develops new ways of thinking and affects the structure and vocabulary of the indigenous language;

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so in order to remain relevant in its own world, te reo had to change to reflect Māori perceptions of the new and complex world they were discovering. During the years following New Zealand becoming a Crown colony and Sir George Grey’s 1847 Education Ordinance, however, there was no grand plan for changes in the language, as Moon explains: Neither was there an uninterrupted linear progression in these developments. Instead, te reo’s evolution, and its retreat in parts of the country, were the result of the chaos of history, with its inadvertent diversions, its chance events and unexpected cultural collisions shaping the language’s fortunes throughout the century. Statutory punctuation points such as the Education Ordinance, while they were undoubtedly important in the history of te reo, were as much markers that reflected existing cultural trends as they were efforts at altering the status quo.

The ‘chaos of history’ is both a felicitously expressed truism and a warning to those seeking simple answers. Inevitably the latter include conspiracy theorists who wonder whether the first-generation settler politicians deliberately strove to weaken te reo even as they brought Māori into parliament. Moon is rightly doubtful, though he does quote one of Hugh Carleton’s wilder speeches that, for some, might hint at such. Carleton, a fluent speaker of te reo, was, throughout his long political career, regarded as an eccentric pedant and parliament’s leading bore, who regularly emptied the House as soon as he rose to his feet. He

was by no means typical of his political generation. My extensive research on the personalities of that generation has revealed no evidence of conspiracy. All were men of their times, but too often their best intentions did not work out as they had hoped, and for many old age was a time of disillusionment. The belief that Māori culture and te reo were dying was not necessarily a wish; it was frequently accompanied by genuine regret. Social Darwinism dominated too much of the second settler generation’s intellectual debates, and Moon’s chronicle of te reo’s decline and Māori impoverishment in the century’s last decades is a sad one. He ends, however, with an optimistic look into the future: From the 1900s, articulate Māori leaders, educated in the Māori world and increasingly in the European one as well, fluent in te reo Māori and English and committed to reviving te reo and Māori as a people, served their culture with a devotion and energy that exceeded anything the language’s opponents could muster, and spearheaded te reo’s uphill battle for survival as a living language.

MEMOIR

As Seen from the Edges by David Herkt

Lost and Gone Away, by Lynn Jenner (Auckland University Press, 2015), 284pp, $34.99

1. My first encounter with the events we now refer to as the Holocaust occurred when I was seven or eight years old, living in a small town in the northern Waikato. As children we were resolutely put to bed early, but I had discovered that I could quietly creep out of the bedroom and crawl across a carpet to watch latenight television through the open doors between the dining room and the lounge, without being observed. It was there, one night, that I had my first glimpse of Nazi concentration camps, of pits and piles of bodies, and skeletal human beings in striped uniforms behind barbed wire. It was a vision amplified by the soundlayering and the nausea-inducing quality of a flickering monochrome TV documentary edited from old news-reel footage. Later, I’d experience books like Lord Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika, battered paperbacks with photo supplements being passed around thirteen-year-old boys as if they were some sort of ghoulish samizdat, a cross

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between illicit literature and pornography. There was also William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the high school library with its footnoted testimonies. However, that earlier glimpse of an unknown TV documentary was my first bewildering confrontation with the human horror of the defining event of the twentieth century. Occurring half a world away from New Zealand and twenty years before my first awareness of it, its impact continued to resonate like the echoes of a great bell struck by an implacable iron hammer. It would take me a lifetime to even begin to resolve the consequences. 2. Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away is a book of four parts, divided into many shorter sections. It begins with the autobiographical story of the loss and recovery of a piece of  Jenner’s jewellery in the ruins of post-quake Christchurch. Then it roves widely, covering such disparate subjects as the poetry of Sappho, archaeology, Huntly & Palmer’s biscuit tins, Freud’s desktop, the art of musical sampling, the paintings of Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz, the phenomenon of missing persons, Maurice Belgrave/Moshe Belgoraj (the late Michael King’s great-uncle by marriage), and much more, until the book coalesces around a series of meditations concerning the Holocaust itself. It includes quotations, original writing, poetry and photographs. More

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personally, the reader becomes familiar with the pruning of a macrocarpa tree and its mysterious owner in Jenner’s home neighbourhood of Raumati Beach, the techniques and strategies of  Jenner’s poetry, and her own visit to Sydney’s Holocaust museum, amid revelations of her thought processes and emotions. Lost and Gone Away is, then, a textual mosaic, written from an individual human perspective, in a precise geographical location, at a specific time, and these vectors ultimately provide both its structure, if not its subject. 3. Late-nineteenth-century philology created the era of the fragment. The trove of torn papyri unearthed from an ancient rubbish dump in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt from 1882 to 1934 included portions of personal letters, school exercises and, of more cultural importance, remains of work from the Greek lyric poets including lines from Sappho. Ezra Pound would famously utilise the Oxyrhynchus ‘Sappho Fragment 85’ in the poem ‘Papyrus’ in his 1916 book Lustra: Spring … Too long … Gongula …

As Hugh Kenner explained in The Pound Era, Pound’s use of this torn strip of poetry would mark the advent of a style and a method that would dominate Modernist and then post-Modernist literature. Pound’s decisive non-linear editing would convert Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) into a poem of

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fragments shored up against the ruin of a world reeling from World War I. The Cantos would further emphasise the technique until the poet fell into silence in 1972. ‘Only connect,’ E.M. Forster wrote as an epigraph to Howards End in 1910, but it would be Ronald Firbank, one of the great undervalued talents of that era, who made the fragment his leitmotif. Unattributed words and floating utterances filled the pages of his novels, suspending his reader in an aural and referential space of some complexity. Firbank’s 1915 novel, Vainglory, amid its broken hubbub of human voices, even includes a literary party to celebrate a newly unearthed fragment of Sappho. Many others would follow, including writers as diverse as Charles Olson and William Burroughs. Poetically, Olson’s work built on the legacy of Pound. ‘The kingfishers’ (1949), one of the first of his poems recognisably Olsonian, was a meditation on time, the stone artefacts of Mexico, the nests of kingfishers, and the construction of an artwork from luminous parts. His final deathbed poem in magisterial The Maximus Poems reads: my wife

my car

my colour

and myself

Each fragmentary phrase of this ultimate work forms a catalogue of loss. Olson’s wife had been killed in an accident, his car had been abandoned in another city, and Olson himself was sickening from his ultimately fatal liver disease. The volume was published posthumously.

The best known of the ‘technicians of the fragment’ is William Burroughs, who promoted a culturally influential poetic of great power. Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ and ‘fold-in’ techniques, creating and combining textual shards, would generate a series of novels, including the ‘Nova Trilogy’ (The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, Nova Express). In the hands of musicians and bands including David Bowie, Talking Heads, Nirvana and many others, Burroughs’ methods would soundtrack an era. In Nova Express he wrote: ‘Shift linguals—Free doorways— Cut word lines—Photo falling—Word falling—Photo falling—Break Through in Grey Room—Use partisans of all nations—Towers, open fire—’ 4. Lost and Gone Away is a nodal net. It takes a number of diverse points (including children’s history books, a dream of Walter Benjamin’s, a brief history of Kapiti Island, a photograph of the poet Paul Celan, applications for emigration to New Zealand between 1936 and 1938, a sculpture entitled Rudderstone by Denis O’Connor in the Wellington Botanic Gardens, and online guides to ‘how to disappear’) and joins them in a broad array. The reader follows Jenner’s linkages and her knots. It is a construction of a world, frequently remote from New Zealand, yet ultimately of it. It is an audacious book, one that could have been written nowhere else. Centring Jenner’s meditation is the unalterable and implacable fact of the

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European Holocaust, where six million Jews and others met their deaths in the greatest official, mechanised murder in human history. ‘[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’), wrote Theodor Adorno in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in 1949. The essential thing about Jenner’s evocation, however, is the fact that it is tactful. It recognises the author’s position with regard to her subject. Jenner comes to the Holocaust elliptically, without presumption, and constructs it from and situates it within a mesh of reference, possibly the only strategy available to a New Zealand writer a half century after the events that centre the book. So Lost and Gone Away is a book of place, but it is set athwart and at an angle from many of the events it describes. The way Jenner deals with Sydney’s Holocaust Museum is a case in point. Jenner foregrounds the fact that this small museum, with its pitiful and tragic artefacts, has guides, Holocaust survivors, who ‘testify’ with frequency to events in their own lives. The experience is at several removes: Jenner, writing from the frontiers, experiences the experience of experiencing the experience. 5. New Zealand was the last significant landmass to be colonised by humankind. Its human history is a bare thousand years long. By the artificial measures and conceptions placed upon the global

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surface, it is the world’s most distant nation, seeming to hang upon the world’s rim, far from the centre. As a young child, I possessed books that depicted sailing ships reaching the waterfall at the world’s edge and sliding over. For me the spectacle lurked just over the Waeranga hills and the horizon observed from Northland’s beaches. Seagulls flew in the spume of the ocean falling into the abyss. Various rocky outcrops interrupted the torrent momentarily. Vapour and mist filled the air. The centre was somewhere else— frequently Britain, which was the heart of maps and global events. Lines of communication—shipping and air routes, and undersea cables—all reached out from it cartographically to join the heart of Empire or the Commonwealth to its colonies. In some matters, New Zealanders still inhabit a nation of echoes. Global events have always arrived in New Zealand with an inherent delay. Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away is a book of distances, both temporal and geographical. It contains aural and cultural resonances as experienced from the borders, in late time. 6. Jenner’s final chapters deal with the more geographically proximate remnants of the Holocaust, including the small Holocaust Gallery at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Visitors can sit on stools and listen to telephones where

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they choose from 32 recorded voices and stories, including #27: ‘Hidden by Righteous Gentiles’, or #31: ‘The Guards at Auschwitz’: At the time of my visit, one of the children, aged perhaps three or four, had one of the telephones up to his ear. At first he just stood there then something made him laugh and he handed the telephone to his mother. She hung up.

No more devastating depiction of New Zealand distances or its effect on the New Zealand psyche could be envisaged. ‘Later,’ Jenner continues, ‘I was struck by the fact that these telephones only worked in one direction.’ 7. Q: Is Jenner’s book itself a fragment? A: Lost and Gone Away links its components much as logical thought links its propositions. Initially, Jenner’s selections appear to follow a line of personal vagrancy but they quickly cohere. They might initially appear wilful, but Lost and Gone Away is not a book of incoherence. Link follows link. It resolves. Q: And somehow Auschwitz is ‘speakable’ within this context? A: Inasfar as Jenner actually reaches this subject, yes. She circles and binds a number of thoughts and ideas. They are held within a construction, but are not of it. Auschwitz is a small part of Jenner’s extended meditation, which, as the book’s title indicates, is about ‘Loss’ and ‘Absence’. Jenner finds her subject in many things, but always she is careful to

point out that she is dealing with the remains of something else, something irrecoverable. Q: You previously spoke of ‘tact’. Is this what you meant? A: There are aspects of ‘tact’ in the book—a refusal to venture across a line that cannot in fact be crossed, especially from a distance in time—especially, too, in physical geography. These are events that happened to someone else, somewhere else, in another time. Any attempt to recover them could even be said to be an inexcusable usurpation of the sanctity of another individual’s experiences. It seems that Jenner can talk about the recovery of memories and their presentation; she cannot talk about the events of those memories. There is something personal, human and very sympathetic about her handling of the topic of the Holocaust. It is not that she wishes to steer away from the subject, but it seems we need not stare. Q: The book is a very individual view, is this correct? A: It is premised on the presentation of a history and a world through the personal: ‘Each has one and is one.’ It is a technique dating back to Herodotus. Jenner foregrounds herself; she is honest about her project. Ultimately, Lost and Gone Away is an extraordinary work, by a New Zealander. It is a bold exploration of limits and absences. It is stylistically adventurous, owing much to the ‘memory-works’ of novelist W.G. Sebald as well as the techniques of Modernism. It grants us access to the way New

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Zealanders construct and create their world in a global era. The distanced fragment is all we possess. 8. In Lost and Gone Away, Jenner writes: More than a year ago a friend, who speaks five languages and reads several more, told me it would not be possible to write about the Holocaust from New Zealand. There’s so little to say here, she said. You should go to Europe. But this is where I am, I said. That is the problem. This is where I am from, this is who I am, and this is where I am.

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Peter Porter Poetry Prize Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of AU$7,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. The overall winner will receive AU$5,000 and a print by the great artist Arthur Boyd, who collaborated with Peter Porter. Poems must not exceed 75 lines and must be written in English. Full details about how to enter and eligibility criteria can be found on the Australian Book Review website where you can also enter online. Entries close 1 December 2016 Subscribe to ABR Online and enter a poem for the special price of AU$55, then enjoy full access to the digital edition. Australian Book Review, founded in 1961, is one of Australia’s leading cultural magazines. We review books and the arts from around the world, with essays, interviews, travel writing, and new creative writing. We offer three international prizes for short stories, essays, and poetry.

www.australianbookreview.com.au

C ALL FOR ENTRIES

BRAND NEW ANNUAL

CHARLES BRASCH YOUNG WRITERS’ ESSAY COMPETITION An essay competition for younger writers (aged 16–21). Essays should be up to 1500 words long. Prize: $500 plus a one-year subscription to Landfall. The winning essay will be published in Landfall. Entries open on 1 December 2016 and close on 31 March 2017. The winner will be announced in Landfall 233 (May 2017). Please email your entry as a Word document to [email protected] with ‘Landfall Essay Competition’ in the subject line. See the Otago University Press website for further information. www.otago.ac.nz/press

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THE COLLECTED POEMS OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD EDS GERRI KIMBER & CLAIRE DAVISON

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THE BROKEN DECADE

Prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand, 1928–39 MALCOLM McKINNON

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Cook’s voyages, colonial collecting and museum histories EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS ET AL.

This sumptuous book showcases the Cook voyage collection at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, which is among the four or five most important in the world, containing over 200 of the 2000-odd objects with Cook voyage provenance that are dispersed throughout the world. ISBN 978 1 877578 69 4, jacketed hardback with ribbon, $59.95

Otago University Press

From good booksellers or www.otago.ac.nz/press/

Anne McCahon, The Obstinate Turnip (1952), School Journal Illustration. Publications Collection, Hocken Library

A TABLE OF ONE’S OWN: THE CREATIVE LIFE OF ANNE MCCAHON 19 November 2016 – 12 February 2017 Opening Saturday 19 November, 4pm Presented in association with McCahon House Trust with support from the University of Auckland, Centre for Art Studies.

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C O N T R I B U TO R S Michelle Arathimos is a writer and reviewer currently living in Melbourne. She has a PhD in creative writing from the IIML at Victoria University of Wellington and is the fiction reviewer for Melbourne-based Overland magazine. Her debut novel, Aukati – Boundary Line, will be published by Mākaro Press in May 2017. Ruth Arnison is a part-time administrator at Knox College in Dunedin. She is the editor of Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ) and the founder of Lilliput Libraries: https:// lilliputlibraries.wordpress.com Nick Ascroft’s latest collection of poems, Back with the Human Condition, is out now from Victoria University Press. Nick Austin was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago in 2012. His work is represented by Hopkinson Mossman in Auckland, and Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington. He lives in Dunedin. Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of three collections of poetry, all published by VUP. She recently completed a PhD in creative writing, the creative component of which was a sequence of poems featuring stories from the Whanganui River region. Tony Beyer is a writer in Taranaki whose recent work has appeared in Kokako, Otoliths, Poetry New Zealand and takahē.

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Peter Bland’s publications include Collected Poems 1956–2011 (Steele Roberts, 2012) and Expecting Miracles (Steele Roberts, 2015). He received the 2011 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. Edmund Bohan is a Christchurch historian, biographer and novelist. Sally Blundell is a writer and journalist and arts editor based in Christchurch. Recent contributions have appeared in Griffith Review 43: Pacific Highways (Griffith University, 2014), Once in a Lifetime: City building after a disaster (Freerange Press, 2014) and Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on place from Aotearoa New Zealand (VUP, 2016). Victoria Broome is a Christchurch writer who has been published in various journals and anthologies in New Zealand and has twice been highly commended in the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award (2010 and 2015). She is a former poetry editor of takahē, and works in mental heath in primary care. Sam Clements lives in Auckland and holds graduate degrees in political studies and management from the University of Auckland, where he has lectured, tutored and facilitated workshops for the business school’s Department of Management and International Business. Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington and now lives in Melbourne. She is a poet and playwright who also writes prose. Her verse novella, Mr Clean & The Junkie, was published by Mākaro Press and longlisted

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in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Carolyn Cossey spent 19 years as a flight attendant but is now earth-bound. She is in her second year of a creative writing degree at Manukau Institute of Technology. David Coventry is a former sound engineer and film archivist who lives in Wellington. He has a Masters in creative writing from the IIML (2010). His first novel, The Invisible Mile, was shortlisted in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and awarded the Hubert Church Award for Fiction. Ben Egerton is a poet and teacher from Wellington who completed an MA in creative writing at the IIML in 2014. Ben has edited Turbine, and some of his work is in print and online in various New Zealand, Australian and British journals and newspapers. Scott Hamilton is an Auckland-based poet, cultural critic and historian. He will publish two books in 2017: one about the Great South Road, and the other about nineteenth-century slave raids on Tonga. David Herkt is an Auckland-based writer and reviewer. Lawrence Jones is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Otago. A literary historian and critic, his book on the adult fiction of Maurice Gee is forthcoming from Otago University Press.

Lynn Jenner’s Lost and Gone Away, a fourpart hybrid of memoir, essays, prose poems and poetry (AUP, 2015), was a nonfiction finalist in the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Lynn’s author website is pinklight.nz. Jan Kemp began writing and performing poetry with the Freed group in the late 1960s and in the late 1970s toured New Zealand as the only woman in the ‘Gang of Four’, the others being Sam Hunt, Alistair Campbell and Hone Tuwhare. In 2005 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. She lives in Germany. Simon Kaan graduated from Otago Polytechnic School of Art in 1993 with a Diploma of Fine Arts in Printmaking (Hons). His work appears in numerous publications and he has exhibited widely. He lives and works in Port Chalmers. Brent Kininmont’s first book of poems, Thuds Underneath, was published in 2015 by VUP. Jessica Le Bas is a Nelson-based writer and poet. Her collection Incognito (AUP, 2007) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry at the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second book of poetry, Walking to Africa, was published by AUP in 2009. Therese Lloyd’s poems have appeared in print and online publications, including Landfall, Sport, Hue & Cry, Jacket2, Metro, Turbine, and the AUP series New Zealand Poets in Performance. A poetry collection,

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Wellington and works in disability community support. She was awarded Headland’s 2015 Frontier Prize. Robynanne Milford’s poem is from the series ‘Finding Voice: Women in the Dunstan’. It’s based around the life of Madame Feraud, wife of M. Feraud, the first Otago winemaker, who was also a local mayor and JP involved with goldmining and water rights.

Other Animals, was published by VUP in 2013. Olivia Macassey is the author of two books of poetry, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2005), and The Burnt Hotel (Titus, 2015). She currently edits the literary journal Brief. Ria Masae is studying towards her BCA at MIT, Auckland. She won the New Voices Emerging Poets Competition in 2015, and the Cambridge Autumn Festival Short Story Competition in 2016. She is a member of the South Auckland Poets Collective. Kirsten McDougall’s first book of interconnected stories, The Invisible Rider, was published by VUP in 2012. Her short novel, Tess, is forthcoming in 2017. She lives and works in Wellington. Caoimhe McKeogh studies English literature at Victoria University of 204

Alice Miller currently lives in Vienna. She was a co-holder of the 2014 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. A collection of her old and new poems, Blaue Stunde, has just been published in German translation by Edition Solitude. Michael Morrissey’s books include Taming the Tiger: A personal encounter with manic depression (Polygraphia, 2011) and Tropic of Skorpeo (Steam Press, 2013). He was the University of Waikato’s writer in residence for 2012. Elizabeth Morton has been published in Poetry NZ, takahē, JAAM, Blackmail Press, Meniscus, PRISM: International, Cordite, Flash Frontier, Smokelong Quarterly, Literary Orphans and Island Magazine, among others. She was shortlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award (2015) and came second in the Sunday StarTimes Short Story Awards that same year. James Norcliffe’s poetry, short fiction and children’s writing has been published widely in New Zealand and elsewhere, including in London Grip, Harvard Review and Manhattan Review. His ninth collection of poetry, Dark Days at the

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Left and far left: James Robinson, untitled drawings from Anthropocene and Asylum series, 2015, 700 x 500 mm. Mixed media on paper.

Oxygen Café, has just been published by VUP.

Poems 2014. Her first book of poetry, Cold Water Cure, was published by VUP in 2016.

Heidi North-Bailey won an international award based in Ireland for her poetry in 2007, and has won New Zealand awards for her short fiction. Her collection Possibility of Flight was published by Wellington’s Mākaro Press in 2015. She joined the Shanghai International Writers Programme as the New Zealand fellow for September–October 2016.

Maris O’Rourke has been published in a range of journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas. Her first poetry collection, Singing with Both Throats, was published in 2013 (David Ling). In 2015 she won the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems with ‘Motherings’.

Claire Orchard’s poetry has appeared in Landfall, Sport, JAAM, 4th Floor, Sweet Mammalian, Turbine and Best New Zealand

Jenny Powell is a Dunedin writer who has had two collaborative and six individual collections of poems published. Her most recent book is The Case of the Missing Body, just published by Otago University Press. 205

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M.D. Rann grew up on the North Shore in Auckland and attended Auckland University before becoming a journalist with the NZBC. After moving to Australia, he was elected to the South Australian parliament, serving as premier of South Australia for ten years. More recently he has been Australian high commissioner to the UK, then ambassador to Italy, and is currently a visiting professor at King’s College London.

plays for radio, television and film. Her contribution to this issue of Landfall is an extract from the second volume of her memoir, forthcoming from Otago University Press. The first, What Lies Beneath, was published in 2014.

Vaughan Rapatahana is a poet, novelist, teacher and Māori language activist who currently lives in Morrinsville in the Waikato.

Kerrin P. Sharpe’s first book, three days in a wishing well, was published by VUP in 2012. A group of her poems also appeared in 2013 in the UK publication Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet). A second book, there’s a medical name for this, was published by VUP in 2014, and her third collection, rabbit rabbit, was published by VUP in July 2016.

Rebecca Reader once translated medieval rolls of parliament for a living. She now teaches English as a foreign language. She lives in Palmerston North.

Elizabeth Smither is working on a new collection titled Night Horse. She was awarded the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2016.

Nicholas Reid is the Auckland-born author of five works of non-fiction. His first collection of poetry, The Little Enemy, was published in 2011 and his second collection, Mirror World, has just been published, both by Steele Roberts.

Michael Steven is an Auckland poet. He is trying to find a home for a poetry manuscript, ‘Walking to Jutland Street’, and is currently at work on another, as well as a collection of short stories called ‘Bastard’s Euchre’.

James Robinson is an artist living in Port Chalmers. His work is held in numerous public, private and corporate collections. In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Wallace Arts Awards residency in New York. In 2008 he was artist in residence at McCahon House in Titirangi and then at Tylee Cottage, Whanganui, later the same year.

John Summers’ work has previously appeared in Hue & Cry, Turbine, New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Herald, JAAM and Sport. His first collection of stories, The Mermaid Boy,
was published by Hue & Cry in 2015.

Elspeth Sandys has published several novels, as well many short stories, and

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Leilani Tamu was the Fulbright/Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai`i in 2013 . Her first poetry collection, The Art of Excavation, was published by Anahera Press in 2014.

Elizabeth Thomson’s major survey exhibition, My Hi Fi My Sci Fi, was shown and toured nationally by Wellington City Gallery 2006–08. She was one of nine artists who took part in the Kermadec Initiative expedition on board the HMNZS Otago in 2011. Her installation Invitation to Openness – Substantive and Transitive States, consisting of 500 white, flocked bronze moths, is on display at the Whangarei Art Museum until 4 December 2016. Chris Tse studied film and English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in creative writing at the IIML. His collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, published by AUP, won the 2016 Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Christopher Ward-Greene is a writer and critic. He has an MA in English literature from the University of Canterbury. Sue Wootton is an award-winning poet and fiction writer whose work has been widely published and anthologised. A new collection of poems is forthcoming from Otago University Press in 2017. She is the editor of the Otago Daily Times Weekend Poem column. Karen Zelas is a Christchurch writer and the fiction editor of takahē. Her third collection of poetry, I Am Minerva, was published by Mākaro Press in August 2016.

CONTRIBUTIONS Landfall publishes poems, stories, excerpts from works of fiction and non-fiction in progress, reviews, articles on the arts, and portfolios by artists. Written submissions must be typed. Email to landfall@otago. ac.nz with ‘Landfall submission’ in the subject line, or post to the address below. Visit our website www.otago.ac.nz/press/ landfall/index.html for further information.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Landfall is published in May and November. The subscription rates for 2017 (two issues) are: New Zealand $55 (including GST); Australia $NZ65; rest of the world $NZ70. Sustaining subscriptions help to support New Zealand’s longest running journal of arts and letters, and the writers and artists it showcases. These are in two categories: Friend: between $NZ75 and $NZ125 per year. Patron: $NZ250 and above. Send subscriptions to Otago University Press, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. For enquiries, email [email protected] or call 64 3 479 8807. Print ISBN: 978-1-927322-24-6  ePDF ISBN: 978-0-947522-45-2 ISSN 00–23–7930 Copyright © Otago University Press 2016 Published by Otago University Press, Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street, Dunedin, New Zealand. Typeset by Otago University Press. Printed in New Zealand by Printlink Ltd.

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Simon Kaan, Untitled, 2015, 1600 x 800 mm. Carved oil on board.