Belich

There are only two really good books shops in New Zealand and they’re both in Auckland. One of them is a Borders, and the other one keeps all its theory books in a case marked ‘Brainy Stuff’*. But almost every small town has at least one second-hand bookshop, and all of them, first- and second-hand alike have large sections devoted to New Zealand history and literature, of all of which there’s more than you might think.

In the history sections you’ll generally find a lot of life stories of ordinary people, published by small press and large alike, and a lot of them are war stories, but New Zealanders seem to like reading about other ordinary New Zealanders’ lives, it seems more than they do in Britain. There’s a lot of dross on the shelves, and some very tedious-looking military histories, but there are also some really good popular works on New Zealand history as a whole.

Last year Karen sent me Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand as homework, and the first fifty pages of pre-Pakeha Polynesian history are quite extraordinary: New Zealand Maori are the heirs of a people who far exceeded the Vikings’ skill at long sea voyages and navigation a thousand years before Leif Ericson started telling lies about ‘Vineland’. But for my money (a part of which is indirectly owed to Ted Crawford for the recommendation), the best historian of New Zealand is James Belich. And the waiter in the Katipo Café, who grew quite irate at the thought of his as-yet-unconceived children being taught history with Michael King texts, agrees with me, though personally he can’t stand the way Belich writes.

In The New Zealand Wars, Belich excavates in some detail the history of the wars fought between Pakeha settlers and Maori, from Hone Heke’s assault on the flagstaff at Kororareka, through the Waikato wars, to Te Kooti and Titokowaru’s wars, between 1845 and 1872, all of which took place after the signing of New Zealand’s ‘foundation’ document, the Treaty of Waitangi. There’s a bit too much detailed military history in there for me to even begin to remember, but the crux of his argument is that traditional military histories of the land wars are shaped by Victorian racial prejudice to the extent of misrepresenting who won key battles and even wars, and seriously misunderstanding the nature of Maori military tactics. The wars forced fast and furious innovation in traditional Maori pa design, and Maori generals invented both the anti-artillery bunker and trench warfare. In the first case British generals simply failed to understand how ‘primitive’ fortifications could withstand intense artillery bombardment (and consequently set themselves up for a turkey shoot), and in the second case were forced to reinvent the tactic from scratch themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century. His research not only looks at Maori accounts of the war, but reads ‘against the bias’ of settler accounts (of which there were many, mainly castigating the British military for failing to crush Maori forces easily and effectively), on the basis of knowing the framework of the bias.

Making Peoples is a larger history of all of New Zealand, from Polynesian seafarers to the end of the nineteenth century, just before the revival of both Maoritanga and recolonialisation. He divides the book into three sections, the making of the Maori, the interaction between Maori and Pakeha, and the making of Pakeha. The Maori sections are fascinating (at least to someone with a relatively recent acquisition of New Zealand history), not least for their explanation of the development of Maori society between landfall and the first encounter with Pakeha (between Abel Tasman and Ngati Tumatakokiri at Murderers Bay, after which Europeans left Aotearoa alone for over a hundred years: “the most efficient and cost-effective piece of anti-colonial resistance ever”) and the dynamics of resource exploration, game hunting and gardening: a far from static and timeless society.

The Maori section suffers a little from supposition in the face of lack of evidence, but the Pakeha section suffers from surfeit of evidence and a tedious welter of statistics demonstrating class formation and mobility, social cohesion, etc. without creating a sustainably interesting narrative about how Pakeha come to be like what they’re like. It’s a considerable advance on Michael King, though, whose underlying project of defining Pakeha as ‘indigenous’ [contra] makes the fractures that Belich outlines theoretically uncomfortable.

But of course the most fascinating section of the book is the middle section, the story of interaction between Pakeha and Maori. One of the most interesting points he makes, reinforcing points from The New Zealand Wars, is that once Pakeha were discovered, Maori urgently desired their presence to trade with and acquire technology from (rapid conversion to Christianity can be seen as a purely instrumental fast track to literacy). When you read in the Rough Guide that land was sold to the British for ‘beads and a blanket’ amounts, the implication is that Maori were either naïve, or conned by the British. In fact, selling land below its true value was a competitive tactic to attract the advantages of European trade and gain an upper economic hand over neighbouring peoples. The theory of ‘fatal impact’ common at the time, which defined encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples as sadly but inevitably to the fatal detriment of the indigenous still underlies a lot of day-to-day thinking about colonial impact. Maori in general consistently acted intelligently in their own interests; how they came to lose a contest for the governorship of New Zealand is considerably more complicated.

Belich describes how the Old New Zealand, part of tentatively British trans-Tasman world was supplanted by the New New Zealand, created by Britons promoting emigration and settlement in one of the less-attractive parts of the British Empire. He makes Kororareka, ‘the hell-hole of the pacific’ sound a cool place, a kind of South Pacific Croatan where whalers, escaped convicts and native New Zealanders all mixed happily in a rumbustious lawlessness, rather spoiled by the arrival of resident Busby, the pompous ambitions of Empire, boring farmers, and ultimately the Treaty.

Underlying both books is an ultimate explanation that ideology calls into existence facts on the ground. During the New Zealand Wars, he argues, it was not pressure for land from settlers that shaped or even caused hostilities, so much as the need for the British Empire to make real the purely theoretical dominion it had established with the Treaty of Waitangi. Likewise, the ‘crusader prospectus’ encouraged emigration to New Zealand, in order to create either an Arcadia (or ‘better Britain’) or a Utopia (‘greater Britain’), thus shaping settlers’ own ideas of what they were creating in the new country.

I’m not sure whether these are ‘materialist’ histories or not: the material power of ideology can’t be denied, but somewhere I think Belich is missing something about the underlying material dynamics of the genesis of empire. If he didn’t, he might have something very interesting to say about it. I’m not prescribing Lenin or anything, because as Belich points out at the very beginning, the apparently small and irrelevant history of New Zealand is both similar and different to other colonial conquests in a way that illuminates and provokes thought about European-indigenous contact (though there’s a danger of casting Maori in the role of a kind of super-indigenous people and judging other encounters in contrast). It certainly has done for me, and that’s more than good enough.

* New Zealanders are generally possessed of an immense practical intelligence: they know how to build stuff, make stuff and fix stuff. I’m completely useless at things like that, and that’s why I’m always making digs about the country’s unintellectual character.

Awelye*

One of the things that surprises me about both Australia and New Zealand is the regionality of newspapers… In a country of less than twenty million, and in an age when network technology can reproduce a British morning newspaper on the doorsteps of Europe, Sydney has the Sydney Morning Herald, and Melbourne, less than two hours’ flight away, has The Age.

Both are full of assessments of the Little Johnnie’s ten years in power. The vox pops at the bottom of the analysis suggest that the feeling that their country has become a meaner and less pleasant place to live overall is a price Australians feel is worth paying for prosperity, or at least the dream of an achievable prosperity. The Australians I’ve been talking to in Sydney feel rather less positive about Howard’s union-bashing and racist identity-mongering than that: for Elizabeth, the recent passing of restrictive anti-union legislation was a tearful moment, and for Ngaire there seems no escape but exile from the “parochialism, racism, fascism, general apathy and democratic decline which seems to be in abundance in Australia”. While the aftermath of the Cronulla riots dies away, Howard, and even his treasurer Costello, still feel confident enough in their racism to declare that immigrants who don’t share ‘Australian values’ are not wanted, like some obscene parody of the Brown-Blair united front.

If Australian is ailing, perhaps a different kind of Australianness is the answer? While I was in Sydney, I read Germaine Greer’s Whitefella Jump Up, in which she suggests that the remedy for the sickness in White Australians’ souls is to adopt the principal of aboriginality for all Australians, to declare an aboriginal republic, and to adopt aboriginal attitudes to the land and ecology in particular.

There is only one way to purge the taint, uncover the secret and ease the otherwise eternal regret, and that is not to give the country back to the Aborigines, because it isn’t ours to give, but to admit that it has been an Aboriginal country all along.

Excavating the history of settler literature, and in particular Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles, she exposes white Australians’ hatred of the twisted and bitter landscape as a fundamental misunderstanding of the continent’s ecology: they denuded its forests, poisoned its water, and planted alien crops. When they got lost on their way to ‘open up’ new land, the Aboriginal people fed them and sent them back only to see them try again, as they failed to see what was possible and not possible in Australia’s ‘senescent bush’.

Just how strange is Australia, with its marsupials and gums, seemingly impenetrable mountains and gullies, and fire-prone coastal bush? On my bush walks I was almost willing myself to see it as ‘alien’, to revel in a strange landscape of dry scaliness and absence of slime, but aren’t these just trees and bushes? If European farming methods are inappropriate, Australia is nevertheless a net exporter of the archetypal European grain, wheat, to more than fifty countries, most notably Iraq: the other big story the Herald and Age were covering was the AWB’s wheat-and-bribes-to-Iraq scandal.

Most people think that New Zealand has a much better relationship between native people and European settlers, its very foundation based on the mutual Crown-Maori Waitangi Treaty. It’s the only place I know that the dominant white colonial-legacy population refer to themselves by the indigenous people’s name for them: Pakeha (gaijin in Japan know they are gaijin, but they’re also inferior), and it’s rare to meet even a white-bread kiwi abroad who won’t impress upon you their knowledge of a few words of the Maori language.

For some, however, that’s not enough. Ani Mikaere in her lecture Are we all New Zealanders now?, argues that the imbalance of colonisation can only be redressed on Maori terms. The land is still a Maori land, and so therefore the principles of Tikanga Maori (Maori ethics) are the only basis on which Pakeha can assume their status as manuhiri (guests) among the Tangata Whenua (the people of the land), and can never rise above that status:

For Pakeha to gain legitimacy here, it is they who must place their trust in Maori, not the other way around. They must accept that it is for the tangata whenua to determine their status in this land, and to do so in accordance with tikanga Maori.

It’s a much harder proposition to accept than Greer’s vague assertion of ‘Aboriginality’, but then it’s made by an indigenous person rather than an colonial Anglo-descendent in exile. I have two problems with Mikaere’s approach: firstly, I don’t think that a set of ethics, Tikanga Maori, developed to regulate traditional Maori society are capable of regulating a complex and industrialised society like New Zealand; secondly, in a society of global population flows, migration and refugees, the Tangata Whenua principle is dangerously inhospitable. Apply it to most of Europe, where whites can claim with some justification to be the native and indigenous population, and you have a moral framework for treating all immigrants and their descendants as permanent guests, subject to the ‘indigenous’ rules, and materially exactly the same kind of racism with which Howard and Costello are manuring the Australian polity.

Wellington’s Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa has a nearly-bewildering array of Maori cultural objects and artifacts, from a full-size meeting house with incredible low-lit carvings inside, to kiddies’ interactive build-a-pataka (storehouse). Most interesting is the Whanganui Iwi exhibition, an exhibition presented by the Maori people of the Whanganui river area (and presented in the second person, a Maori ‘we’ rather than ‘they’), covering history and interaction with Pakeha from environmental despoliation of the river, suspected genocidal acts, and culminating in the 1995 occupation of Moutoa Gardens and reestablishment of the Pakaitore, part of a new wave of Maori activism.

I don’t belong in either of these countries: my pale celtic skin flares pink at the gentlest touch of this antipodean sun; I lost count of the number of times in Australia I found myself replacing the ‘crazy country’ thought with the ‘crazy white people’ thought. But not all the problems of European-colonised societies are locked in the roots of the act of colonisation. There’s enough obvious similarity between the politics of Howard and the politics of Blair (NZ parliamentary politics by contrast are a welter of playground sexual taunts) to see that parochialism, racism, fascism, general apathy and democratic decline are diseases that affect the whole world.

* Germaine Greer refers to this use of the word ‘Awelye’, Emily Kngwarreye’s only given titles for some of her paintings, meaning “the whole lot”, summing up Aboriginal artists’ understanding of painting as a reflection of the totality and interconnectedness of all things, rather than individual representations of particular things.

Homework

For the last four months I’ve been reading books about and from Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Here are four fiction and four non-fiction, four kiwi, three Japanese and one Australian:

The Bone People
Keri Hulme

An astonishing combination of mysticism and storytelling: how three unrelated individuals, an artist, a factory-worker and a lost child – Maori, Pakeha and both – become a new kind of family. Interpenetrating streams of consciousness carry the story through discovery, loss and redemption.

Though the paperback is fêted on its cover as a ‘visionary New Zealand fable’, that ghettoises it a little – the unspoken assumed universality of European and American fiction covers a lot that’s just as culturally specific. Nevertheless, Maoritanga, especially language, runs through the novel, and when Kerewin Holmes, the artist, says “whereas by blood, flesh and inheritance, I am but an eighth Maori, by heart, spirit and inclination I feel all Maori”, it seems to speak for the feeling of Keri Hulme, the novelist.

The book’s spiritual pivot, when three lives in broken orbits begin to spiral back together, is when Joe Gillayley is chosen by a dying kaumatua to look after a small god in a stone mauri. The old man tells Joe:

“By accident or design, when the old people arrived here, they induced, or maybe it arrived of itself, the spirit of the islands, part of the spirit of the earth herself, it rested in the godholder they had brought… something very great had allied itself with some of us, had given itself to us” (p440/1)

which expresses something unique about (Keri Hulme’s consciousness of) Maori people: they are one of the few major indigenous people displaced by Europeans since 1492 whose own history and legends tell of their own canoe-borne arrival on the islands of New Zealand from Polynesia. Yet the feeling of spiritual ownership of the land itself remains complete, perhaps even stronger for the sense of arrival being also the gift of the land.

The Penguin History of New Zealand
Michael King

Immense and valuable five hundred page history of New Zealand from prehistory to the present day. The most exciting part of the book is the pre-Pakeha section, which examines not only the history of Moriori and Maori arrival, but also its historiography. King explains that Aotearoa was not the universal pre-Pakeha Maori name for New Zealand. “Polynesian ancestors came from motu or islands, and it was to islands that they gave names”: Te Ika a Maui (Maui’s fish) for the North Island , and Te Waka-a-Aoraki (Aoraki’s canoe) for the South Island. Good descriptions of New Zealand as a protein larder for its new arrivals: from the islands’ pre-human mammal-less ecosystem, pre-Pakeha settlers eliminated thirty-two species of birds, to Europeans’ more recent nine.

Then comes the story of the white ‘discovery’ and settlement of New Zealand (how did Abel Tasman miss the entire southern coast of Australia to pitch up on the South Island?); from then on Pakeha and Maori stories run in tandem. There’s a little bit too much Pakeha political history of New Zealand on the 19th century and the tedious debates of a parliamentful of pompous and bewhiskered royalist sheep farmers.

White settlers’ impact on New Zealand’s indigenous people was less devastating than in either North America or Australia. Despite the general genocidal impulses of European settlers, and their belief that absorption into white society was the best for a declining race, some Maori peoples, once armed, even had the best of it in the mid-nineteenth century wars. The existence of something like the Waitangi Tribunal is unimaginable in either Australia or the USA.

White New Zealand’s generally-laughable love of the Empire and Britishness (therefore their rejection of becoming part of the Federation of Australian colonies in 1901) has its unbearable consequences in the thousands of Kiwis who put to sea to fight for the motherland in the first world war as ANZACs, to find butchery and betrayal at Gallipoli. The book ends with a description-cum-plea for New Zealand’s unique “good-hearted, practical, commonsensical” tolerance striving towards a joint Pakeha/Maori tradition of mutual respect.

Kiwi Tracks
Andrew Stevenson

Published in the ‘Lonely Planet Journeys’ series of travellers’ personal accounts. Stevenson takes his broken heart from Norway to New Zealand for several months to tramp long-distance walks, beginning with the reputedly most beautiful walk in the world, the Milford Track. The scenery and the walking of it come across vividly, and also awkwardness and surprising encounters of travelling alone. He’s at his most irritating when pontificating about Maori spirituality, or patting himself on the back when the driver of a ride he’s hitched tells him how much he ‘gets’ Maoritanga, and he’s unnecessarily rude about Queenstown bungee jumping types, unaware of his own relative selfishness and impact on the environment. Nevertheless, when he finds what might be love again at the end of the book it’s hard not to feel happy for him.

All Visitors Ashore
C. K. Stead

Stead is a New Zealand modernist, a literary generation or two before Hulme, who had his Overseas Experience in London. But this novel is entirely set in NZ, around the Auckland harbourfront strike of 1951, and a small community of bohemians in Takapuna. It’s narrated by an older Curl Skidmore, talking to and of his younger self, a faithless poet living in a seaside shack. It’s about departures too: when a great liner leaves harbour, streamers are thrown from deck to shore by the passengers to hold at the other end, symbolically broken when the ship pulls out; a scene I oddly saw repeated weeks later in Ishiro Honda’s Gojira. Dense and modern, very little Maori influence; less archetypally ‘New Zealand’ than Hulme but just as specific to place and time, the personal struggles of the bohemians for meaning and experience pitched against Sid Holland’s war on the dockers, at one of New Zealand’s darkest and most reactionary post-war moments.

30 Days in Sydney, a wildly distorted account
Peter Carey

On the eve of the 2000 Olympics Carey returns to Sydney for a month from his professional life in New York, to see old friends whom he tries to get to relate Sydney through stories of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This is Sydney seen through the eyes of mostly successful and wealthy middle-aged men: writers, artists and adventurers.

Lots of history thrown in: settlement, the jailer-gentry, Macarthur and Bligh, the twelve-metre high shell middens on Bennelong point from which the settlers made lime for mortar. De Selby from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman’s makes several bizarre appearances. Carey is not from Sydney but loves it; is amusingly afraid to drive over the Sydney Harbour Bridge; hates the monorail and the Central Business District; is alarmed by the transformation the Olympics is wreaking upon the city.

Peter Myers gives a lecture on the history of the Sydney Opera House (on Bennelong Point) and its relationship to the world’s other palaces of culture. In particular, Myers displays a doubled-up image of the Royal Festival Hall which shows it sharing a structural aesthetic with the Opera House (the Festival Hall is currently covered in scaffolding, which makes this hard to imagine and verify). Leslie Martin, the London County Council architect of the Festival Hall was key in picking Jørn Utzon as the architect of the Opera House. So the Sydney Opera House is both an Opera House, as European cities have Opera Houses – Vienna’s on the Ring, Copenhagen’s on the water: a (slightly insistent, for far-flung Sydney) demonstration of the city’s achievement in both musical and architectural sophistication, the ne plus ultra of High Culture – and also a post-war Culture Palace like the Festival Hall, Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia (and even the Dresden Kulturpalast and East Berlin’s Palast Der Rebublik), a welcoming, open and democratic spaces for everyone to enjoy what is still ‘high’ culture, with the arrogant bombast taken out of the architecture itself. Perhaps the Opera House, designed by a Danish architect is the greatest and most impressive of all the European culture palaces?

Fix, a white man asks Vicki, who he’s just discovered is an Aborigine ‘where’s your country’, meaning where are your people from, which is taken a) by his fellow whiteys as an excuse to remind him that ‘her’ country was stolen and b) by Vicki as patronising and presumptive. The next morning they get up for the dawn Anzac service and Carey overcomes his youthful objections to its imperial connotations. But later in a café as they watch Howard reconciled with the Turks over Gallipoli when he still cannot apologise for 200 years of Aborigine oppression, she destroys her adoptive white father’s military medals which she wore to the ceremony.

In the Miso Soup
Ryu Murakami

The soup is not just a Japanese kind of hot water that our hero Kenji is in, but specifically miso soup, the mystery of a bowl of foul brown yeasty soup with what look like kitchen scrapings floating in it – Tokyo as seen by a gaijin. A psychopathic, brain-damaged, prostitute-killing gaijin.

This is less ambitious and has a smaller scope than Coin Locker Babies, but if you think of Murakami as the ‘author’ of Takashi Miike’s Audition, and therefore a spawner of ‘extreme Asia’ cinema, then the book makes more sense, and even more so given it was written in 1997, before Audition was released.

Young sex-tour guide Kenji, with sweet and innocent 16-year old girlfriend Jun, meets fat American Frank who’s disturbing over-friendly, and Kenji suspects him almost straight away of having killed a prostitute he’s read about in the papers. The suspense isn’t in realising that Frank is the killer, but in Kenji’s attraction to him, fascination masked as fear of being unable to escape (he sticks a fragment of human skin to Kenji’s door), and wondering how far Kenji will let him go.

The murder scene in the omiai pub in kabuki-cho is coldly over-described – as tourists are dismembered and die the narration flits from one to another, describing exactly how bits of them are hanging off or flopping about, too much like a set of effects instructions for Miike.

Frank, is a super-killer like Ichi: hyper-violent, hyper-reflexed, unbeatable and again, the suspense doesn’t lie in whether he can be stopped, only in Kenji’s growing complicity. When Frank finally leaves Kenji on New Year’s eve, carefully explains the Miso metaphor and leaves no clues to link Kenji to anything, it all ends rather flatly.

Frank’s self-told backstory is entertaining: brain damage, killing, being drugged up and the desire to walk until he gets lost, and the novel has one gorgeously striking image. When Franks flips into his killing state, something happens to his face, which Kenji describes as like a gnat leaving a flower: the almost-imperceptible sudden disappearance of something you didn’t notice until its absence provokes you.

Strangers
Taichi Yamada

This carries a big quote from David Mitchell on the front and the inner dustflap carries on to claim that here Haruki Murakami meets Paul Auster. It’s got some of the laconic style of Murakami, but none of the depth of either. It’s a ghost story with two sets of ghosts and a twist: a girl from protagonist Harada’s apartment building who kills herself after he refuses to have a drink with her and then returns to begin the relationship that could have been; and the ghosts of his parents who reappear in a neglected corner of Asakusa.

Harada is a professional screenwriter, and in one of the best moments his friend and colleague Mamiya confesses his attraction to Harada’s ex-wife. What happens subsequently is described by Harada as the kind of emotional cliché that they as professional writers sought to avoid, which lets Yamada off the hook by not only letting him write a knowing clichéd scene, but letting the knowingness happen in his characters’ shoes.

But it’s just a ghost story – it doesn’t have the resonance of Auster’s New York Trilogy, the length and lives involved, or the extended metaphysical sequence at the end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist is actually fighting for something more real than the bizarre world he’s entered. There’s no metaphor, and the supernatural is entirely on the surface (the ghosts disappear like ghosts should, his parents’ apartment is of course a vacant lot when he goes back to it). Best read in a single sitting, at the pace of a film, for its action and suspense.

Wrong about Japan
Peter Carey

Carey takes his son, a hardcore Japanophile and anime addict to Tokyo. They agree to avoid the ‘Real Japan’ of tea ceremonies and Kabuki, for the weirder Japan of anime, manga and fanboys.

Charley’s friend Takashi who hangs around with them, works in a donut shop, and dresses like a character from Mobile Suit Gundam. Carey discusses him as an Otaku, but he also uses the term ‘visualist’, also describing the Sunday gangs in Harajuku, to refer to the implicit visual ethic in the concentration on appearances by people who dress up for recreation. Peter and Charley also meet a proper otaku, a transsexual called Yuka who worked on Gundam.

Carey discusses the more obvious art-film anime classics like Grave of the Fireflies, and at the end they miraculously meet Hayao Miyazaki himself, at Studio Ghibli. Along with some slightly leaden analyses drawing Japanese history, the War and all that into his discussion of anime, Carey’s point seems to be that the Real Japan is the one of anime and visualists, rather than the ‘traditional’ Japan.