In July 2016 I wrote to Tim Curnow, the renowned Australian literary agent and son of New Zealand poet Allen Curnow, for permission to read some of his father’s papers held in the National Library, Wellington. He was curious enough to ask what I was up to. I explained that I was writing a book that spun around five early- to mid-twentieth-century New Zealanders who made their homes in Australia, all of whom to a greater or lesser extent became household names in their new home and all of whom, pretty much, are forgotten. ‘An odd collection of people,’ he responded. He did not ask the question the Bulletin’s review asked of Baume, but others have.
‘Why?’
The answer is complex and also, in some ways, extremely personal.
Like many New Zealanders I have a strong affection for Australia, both for its land and its people. My husband Tim Woodhouse is Australian and my son, the singer-songwriter Skyscraper Stan, is a contemporary equivalent to any of the young musicians who might have curiously come along to the Macquarie Galleries in the 1940s. Had he been born some 90 years earlier, Stan may well have been there, along with his cousin, singer and guitarist Oskar Herbig, and who knows how many hundreds of others. My generation wore a jet trail across the Tasman to Sydney. Stan and Oskar’s contemporaries go to Melbourne. Much like Auckland, Sydney has been ‘Manhattan-ised’ – that is, rents and the general cost of living are far too high for young New Zealanders arriving with small savings and a currency perennially worth less than the Australian. Despite the rapidly rising cost of living in Melbourne, that city somehow retains its Boho artistic character. The music scene thrives in the face of multiple closures of longstanding venues in gentrifying areas. Alternative theatre struggles on, despite savage cuts to the federal and state arts budgets. To New Zealand eyes, there are jobs in every field advertised in dazzling numbers. Our young travellers try their luck: Melbourne is their Mecca.
How many of them, packing their bags and taking the flight, contemplate how they are the present manifestation of a long procession of New Zealanders who did the same thing? In the first decades of the nineteenth century, we made our way by barque and clipper, trading seal fur, kauri spars and flax. It was around this time that Māori began visiting Australia, sometimes taking up residence, in ever-increasing numbers. By the early twentieth century Māori were so much a part of the Australian scene they were included in the celebrations for Federation. Marjorie Quinn, a Sydney-sider, wrote in her memoir:
When Federation was proclaimed on 1 January 1901, there was an elaborate procession through the streets of Sydney, starting at 11 am from the Domain. Led by shearers, there were many floats illustrating aspects of Australian life. Maoris sat statue-like on great horses; there were Indians on their spirited horses, superb figures. There were bursts of thunderous applause from crowds of onlookers … [The procession] passed along Macquarie Street under decorated arches of coal, wool and wheat, and moved toward St Mary’s Cathedral.1
Quinn’s almost subconscious inclusion of Māori in this description is perhaps proof of public awareness of the deliberations concerning the inclusion of New Zealand in the Federation. It was decided that it would not be, and this led to lengthy trade negotiations between the two nations. More curious in Quinn’s description is the absence of Aboriginal people. That they were omitted from Federation celebrations demonstrates, yet again, how ignored and marginalised the first Australians were.
Many of the New Zealanders past and present who thrived and prospered across the Tasman allowed history to forget that they were born much further south. They either felt no strong affiliation with the country of their birth or wanted strongly to be accepted as genuinely Australian. The five New Zealanders who are the subjects of this book did not forget their origins. Even so, they are, for the most part, forgotten at home. This is a common phenomenon. Make it big across the ditch, and back in the archipelago it’s as if you were never born at all.
While New Zealand writers and artists who came to prominence in Australia are likely to be ignored at home, almost out of spite, in the literary world this established pattern was recently disrupted. In 2016 our one and only book prize, the Ockham, was awarded to Stephen Daisley, a New Zealander by birth who has lived all his life in Australia. The year before, the Michael King Award, a $100,000 grant made to enable a writer to work on a non-fiction project for two years, was awarded to Martin Edmond, a New Zealander who has lived in Sydney for more than three decades. Both are excellent writers, so whether they were deserving recipients is not debatable here. What is curious is that these awards were made to expatriates who have access to far greater and more numerous funds in their richer, adopted country and, further, that there was very little kvetching from their much poorer and equally deserving resident peers.
I have chosen my five subjects from the many contenders not only because they retained their national identity but also because they were all, curiously, through mother, father or both, first-generation New Zealanders of European descent. Their families had not been in New Zealand for long enough for a strong sense of national identity to have developed, yet they believed they had one. They were New Zealanders. Whatever their difference or particular fields of creative endeavour, they shared the common attribute of wanting to define themselves as fundamentally different from the Australians among whom they lived and worked. They may even have shared the same opinion, deep down, that New Zealand was superior to its giant neighbour culturally, politically and geographically: a kind of small island arrogance that would never be tolerated in Australia. Or could it have been part of the early conviction, now weakened, that no matter how recently your family had established itself in New Zealand, individuals have every right to lay claim to the soil as deeply and spiritually as do tangata whenua?
When Dulcie Deamer left New Zealand in 1908 the country’s population was nudging one million, an increase of 120,451 from the census of 1901 seven years earlier. This contrasts wildly with immigration in our time, the biggest onslaught since the nineteenth century: over five hundred thousand new chums in the nine years of the Key administration, and these only the immigrants who have been granted permanent residency. The true number is much higher. In the face of this influx, many non-Māori experience a sense of dislocation and alarm that approaches the lower slopes of Māori upheaval during and since colonisation. Overwhelming development to house the new arrivals occurs all over the country in places that are held commonly as a kind of public tūrangawaewae – around once pristine lakes and rivers already suffering from a bovine population explosion, and around our wild coast. Wealthy Americans, twenty-first-century Riddifords and Butlers richer than the locals, buy up the South Island. In Auckland the nineteenth-century fear of ‘blow-ins’ from New South Wales, venal and probably of convict descent, is mirrored by widespread disconcertion at the arrival of Chinese, Taiwanese, Thais, Malays, Koreans and all others we clumsily think of as ‘Asian’, a word that begins to take on the British meaning that includes Indians.
Over the years my Pākehā subjects emigrated west, New Zealand was Māori and European, with a small Han Chinese population. Dulcie, Doug, Eric, Jean and Roland understood what they were part of, and what they were leaving behind: an imported hodge-podge of mostly Irish, England, Scottish and Welsh who had achieved a degree of homogeneity alongside a mostly geographically distant Māori presence. None of the subjects I have chosen for this book is Māori because I am interested in how a national identity rises among recent immigrants, who then migrate somewhere else within the memory of two generations. Māori have an enviable right to belong in Aotearoa.
In a Listener interview of 1999 I talked about Pākehā guilt and remarked how I had always envied Māori their sense of belonging, just as many non-Māori do. When actor Rawiri Paratene told me that Pākehā guilt had always been advantageous for Māori in their need to retain land and conserve their culture, I felt that I had at last been of some use. Many of my novels have Māori characters and I have not stepped on any toes, as far as I am aware.
For much of my adult life I felt seared by guilt for the actions of my forefathers. Great-great-granduncle Thomas Henry Smith was a judge in the Native Land Court, a fluent speaker of te reo, whose second, much-loved wife was Māori, but nevertheless he acted on the part of the colonial government in freeing up land for British settlement. Among his papers in the Auckland War Memorial Museum are letters to his brother full of discomfort and anguish after the passing of the 1865 Native Land Act, which enabled individual Māori to sell land without consultation with iwi or hapū. Smith was aware of the devastation the new legislation would incur but went ahead regardless.
On my maternal side, a great-grandfather was a timber miller, responsible for the loss of hundreds, possibly thousands, of acres of virgin bush in the Kaimai Ranges and the Mount Pirongia district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his time the bush was there to be conquered, torn down, replaced by cattle and sheep, corn, passive pastureland, orchards and pine. There was a widely held misconception that the forest would rejuvenate, that it was in endless supply.
To have ancestors responsible for such ‘crimes’ is not unusual in post-colonial societies. If your family is of several generations’ standing then it is likely that at least one pale-skinned antecedent is responsible for helping to destroy the natural environment or of acquiring land by nefarious means. Those of us of successive Pākehā generations can only lobby governments for recompense for Māori loss and support ongoing Treaty reparations.
Soon after my son returned at age 21 to live in the land of his birth but not his upbringing, he remarked during a phone call that he had felt his guilt slough away. Stan started school in Auckland in 1993, a time when it was possible for Pākehā children to believe that they had no ‘culture’, or at least none worth preserving, and that they were in some way personally responsible for the ongoing disparities between Pākehā and Māori in health, education and employment. He felt this keenly, as did many of his non-Māori friends from this time.
Guilt on a national scale does neither side any favours. It lessens us, makes us into boobies, and clouds the issue with emotion that is not constructive. It could be argued that it was a toxic by-product of this guilt that got Don Brash up on the stage for his infamous 2004 Orewa speech to the local Rotary Club. In some twisted way, he could have been trying to scorch a deep, unacknowledged sense of guilt by assuming a higher moral ground. Otherwise, why would a supposedly intelligent, informed man make accusations about Māori having ‘special treatment’? On the lighter side, it is perhaps insidious guilt that creates the character that is the butt of so many jokes in Australia: the quiet, indirect, apologetic New Zealander. Vincent O’Sullivan, a senior and much-loved New Zealand writer who frequently spends periods of time across the Tasman, tells a story of how an Australian once remarked to him that if you step on a New Zealander’s foot he’s the one who says sorry.
So much for guilt. What about envy, which is the other side of the same coin? It’s simple really. Māori belong in New Zealand. There was a lengthy period in our history when the plight of the Moriori was used to equalise Māori and Pākehā. We were the second colonisers, doing to Māori only what they had done to Moriori, but more humanely. School children were taught from the early twentieth century on a version first enshrined in a 1916 School Journal that Moriori were an inferior race, darker and with flatter noses, and that they had all died out. That myth has itself died out now – we know that Māori settled New Zealand in successive waves from Hawaiki, and that Moriori were the earliest wave some centuries before.
‘We’re all immigrants,’ say New Zealanders opposed to further Treaty settlements. Arguments wax and wane about the exact number of years Māori were here before ‘us’. Historian Michael King pegged it at about six hundred; some Maori scholars believe it more like a thousand. The length of time is surely irrelevant. The point is, Māori are Pacific people and those of us whose ancestors came later in the nineteenth century are not. I would love to be able to stand on New Zealand soil and feel that I absolutely belong. The fact that I feel little or no connection to Britain doesn’t bring a corresponding genetic claim to the islands of Aotearoa. It means, despite my relative acknowledgement as a New Zealand writer, and the whakapapa of seven family generations born here, that I truly belong nowhere.
In 2008 I made a trip to London for the final stages of research for my novel The Open World, a fictionalised account of the life of my great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Horlock Smith, mother of Thomas Henry. One evening I went out to dinner with academic and New Zealandophile Dr Ian Conrich. Through much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Dr Conrich championed New Zealand culture in Europe and the UK, establishing the now-defunct Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and organising conferences that highlighted the work and achievements of New Zealand writers, film-makers, academics and artists. The evening after I had given a lecture at the centre, he and I went to a restaurant in Islington called Gallipoli. My ancestor, before she boarded the Tomatin in 1841 as part of Bishop Selwyn’s party, had lived in rooms in Cross Street, a stone’s throw away. I told Ian about that as we ate our falafels.
‘You’re a real Londoner!’ he exclaimed. ‘My family came here from Poland after the war. You’re more of a Londoner than I am.’
A sudden, powerful sense of belonging infused my veins, a delicious, golden feeling of belonging that I had never known before. These are the streets my ancestors trod. I need feel no guilt. This is my place.
The epiphany fled as quickly as it had arrived. That granny was a long way back and, when you do the sums, each of us has sixteen great-great-great-grandmothers. Who were they, really? The others could have come from anywhere.
When I interviewed the Chinese writer Xu Xinran at the 2015 Auckland Writers’ Festival, she told me she was sure I had Chinese ancestry. When I spent time in London with the Aboriginal activist Bruce Pascoe he asked me several times if I was Māori. Māori friends have asked me the same question. I have never had the controversial racial heritage swab test to prove I’m anything other than another member of the drifting, white-skinned, blue-eyed diaspora. Family lore, patchy as it is, doesn’t take in an ancestor from anywhere other than the British Isles.
My husband’s family have been in Australia for far less time than mine in New Zealand, but still, when my son went to live there he felt immediately at home in the same way, I imagine, as did Wakelin, Deamer, Baume, Devanny and Stewart.