This was most probably the site of a villa, perhaps the property of a native Briton who had adopted the style and manners of the distant capital. See? They’ve used the standard technique: there’s the base, the statumen, where they laid down rubble and sometimes a wooden floor, and they’d cover that with ferns or chaff to stop the lime in the concrete layer that overlaid it from damaging the timber: that’s what Pliny the Elder recommended. And on top of that there’s the nucleus — the kernel of a nut, the necessary bit — the bedding layer of mortar made from lime and smashed tiles, and then there are the tiles, laid to an individual pattern or maybe a pattern they’d bought ready-made, traced on a big sheet of linen. And see? Over there? That gap: that’s the hypocaust.
I stood there with cold seeping in through inadequate leather shoes and thought, Yes, they’d definitely need that: underfloor heating, not to mention fur-lined boots. Mosaics of dolphins and cherubs belonged in warmer climes, places where the temperature reaches 35 degrees and climbing, and tiles are cool under bare feet. They belonged there, at the heart of the empire, not out here where cows breathed small individual clouds into the chill spring air and the pups climbed from their trenches at regular intervals to warm mud-caked hands on cups of caramel-coloured English tea. I looked down at the pattern that had lain under this field and thought how odd it was, this scrap of Rome in the midst of an English field.
Someone had laid all those tiles of cream and brown to form a pattern. Someone’s fingers had arranged them to form an indestructible carpet in the rooms where guests would be received. People had walked back and forth across these tiles, children had run about and spilled stuff, and how inconceivable it must have seemed to all of them that the floor might disappear. The walls, too, the stones carried off to build other things. Weeds would take hold and worms would burrow and bury and soon no one would recall that this house had ever existed.
That’s what I find myself thinking about as I drive along River Road one spring afternoon, the river rushing by in spring spate, the car scraping on gravel, past homes and the spaces that had been homes.
I think about that villa at the edge of an empire.
THERE WAS AN EMPIRE HERE TOO. Or, rather, there were several empires, sliding over and under one another in constant grinding movement beneath our feet, shaping the way we have lived on the surface.
There was first the vast sphere of scattered island states separated by the blue plains of the Pacific, explored and colonised over millennia, linked by culture and race but adapting as colonies do, in their individual fashion, to the exigencies of new landscapes. We lived on its edge, at its southernmost limit.
Then there was the empire for which the map of this city could be read as a flag, set down with its Union Jack verticals, horizontals and criss-cross diagonal as a marker on a new frontier. That empire rephrased invasion and land seizure into a genteel evolution of governance in which New Zealand began as a Crown colony in 1841, before evolving into a dominion in 1907 with a governor-general and partial autonomy that left the big decisions concerning defence, foreign affairs or constitutional amendment to be made 12,000 miles away in London. It was a momentous event, nevertheless, commemorated in the name of a road in Auckland, the capital city’s daily newspaper and a brewery.
It was celebrated, too, in an exhibition, a great exhibition to rival those of larger cities: the New Zealand International Exhibition. In 1906, on the banks of this river, ‘in the cool green parklands of Hagley Park’, rose the largest building ever erected in the country. A palace ‘in the French Renaissance style’, made of glass and steel and the somewhat dubious-sounding ‘stuccoline’ glittered above the oak trees and flowerbeds. Its ‘snowy towers and glowing dome of white and gold’, its 14 acres of display area were, the official record has it, a demonstration of ‘British pluck’. At the top of one of the towers of this Palace of Arts and Industries, 160 feet up, from a viewing platform reached by an electric elevator, the visitor could gaze down upon this city, the ‘capital of the Prairie Province’, the most fertile, the most orderly of all the cities in the land, developed without the restraints of difficult terrain or the land disputes that had interrupted steady progress elsewhere. (The snub was registered: neither Otago nor Wellington contributed a stand to the exhibition, preferring to leave the Prairie Province to crow alone.)
Over the entrance to the palace in letters 5 feet high, ‘HAERE-MAI’ blazed by night, outlined in electric bulbs. New technologies, 60 miles of electrical wiring supplemented by a system dependent on gas, rendered all within the palace as clear as the day outside its walls.
When proposing the exhibition to Parliament, the Premier Richard Seddon had promised proof that ‘the forest, the plain and the swamp have been subdued, and industry and thrift prevail’. The artefacts of science, art, industry, education and what he termed ‘an improved higher civilisation’ would be tangible evidence of progress in this, the country that had become the world’s social laboratory, darling of nineteenth-century European and American political theorists. Men like Albert Métin, who visited New Zealand in 1899 to see for himself the results of the social legislation that had introduced, for the first time in the world, universal suffrage for women, old-age pensions, a minimum working wage, maximum working hours, compensation for work injuries and compulsory arbitration of labour disputes. This ‘paradis des ouvriers’ had divided the country’s large estates into smaller landholdings: 176 South Island runs had been bought and repackaged as 3500 farms. And all, as he wrote in a book reporting his observations here and in South Australia, without paying much heed to a basis in theory. This was ‘le socialisme sans doctrines’, minus the intellectual discourse he was familiar with in his own country — a fact he ascribed to English influence.
Here, ordinary workers could read, but they were above all devoted to sports, especially the sports of the English bourgeoisie: cricket and football and horse racing. Unlike French workers, they were not interested in going to the theatre. Many were supporters of temperance in the English style, wishing to ban the sale or production of all fermented drinks, and, to the astonishment of this Frenchman, happy to live in a country that did not produce wine. Nor were these workers pacifists, like European workers. In fact, in Australia and New Zealand he detected a enthusiasm for the British Empire, the proof being statues of General Gordon and other military heroes. Nor were New Zealand’s workers especially conscious of international solidarity, for which the country’s isolation from other centres was no doubt to blame.
Instead, this country had embarked on a spontaneous experiment. New Zealand was a place where ‘toute experience nouvelle trouve un terrain favorable’ — where every new experience finds favourable ground. Here he discovered a readiness to experiment with such things as state farms for unemployed workers. In Christchurch, he visited the homes of working people. ‘Ce que desire l’ouvrier anglais c’est une maisonette à lui, un home séparé, et non point un logement dans une immense batisse.’ What the English worker wants is his own separate home and not an apartment in an immense building. This home was designed to improve the conditions of the city worker. In hamlets around Christchurch — Pawaho near Heathcote and Tamai in Woolston — he saw homes of several rooms, gardens with potatoes and a few flowers, and a general air of satisfaction.
In its impulsive fashion, New Zealand had chosen to follow this liberal path, creating a country where the state was the greatest landowner in the colony, the owner of three-quarters of the primary schools instructing 90 per cent of the children, owner of the railway network and a national bank and directly employing almost half the country’s workers.
Without theoretical debate, the country has come up with ‘le socialisme d’état’ — state-sponsored socialism.
Le Socialisme sans Doctrines is an engaging book, filled with a kind of happy excitement. Métin writes well and vividly. He describes, for example, standing on the plains near Christchurch, newly refashioned into a patchwork of farms.
&nbs
p; Ce sont d’immenses espaces ondules couverts
d’herbe: la forêt primitive y a été incendiée au
temps des grand proprietaires pour faire place
aux moutons; l’oeil est a peine arrête de loin
au loin par le long glaives verts du phormium
tenax et par la chevelure flottante au vent du
cabbage tree.
The plains are immense undulating spaces
covered with grass: the primeval forest was
burned during the time of the big landowners
to make way for sheep; the eye moves freely,
unimpeded by the long green blades of flax
and the wind-tossed hairdos of cabbage trees.
I like those ‘hairdos’: they’re what make Métin more than a dry theorist. He surveys this vision of the new order in the worker’s paradise.
The rivers descend from the high mountains
that close off the horizon, running to the sea
in big stony beds where their waters divide
in shallow branches, swelling suddenly with
snowmelt. One or two little stations rise along
the railway line from Christchurch to Dunedin,
some churches, weatherboard stores that
mark the centre of newly created villages …
the ploughs are beginning for the first time to
turn the soil … the whole, under a grey sky
at the close of winter, is hazy like an imperfect
lithograph. The work of colonisation has
scarcely begun but the houses, the ploughing,
lend life to these immense solitudes …
It is this same vision of the wide plains that introduces the blueprint a little over 100 years later, the plain that Métin described as ‘le grand champ des expériences de legislation foncière’, ‘champ’ meaning both a field of corn and the grand parade ground for display — the great field of experiment in land-based legislation.
IN THIS INSTANCE, THE PLAIN of experiment did indeed form the setting for a vision that ‘inspired the world’. Métin was only one of many keeping a careful eye on what was happening here. It was a British politician, Herbert Asquith, who described the country as ‘a laboratory in which political and social experiments are every day made for the information and instruction of the older countries of the world’.
This was the experiment celebrated in the airy domes in Hagley Park, when the exhibition opened with a specially commissioned ‘Exhibition Ode’, composed by Johannes Andersen, Alexander Turnbull librarian and prolific writer on such subjects as New Zealand birds and place names.
‘Hail! Hail! From the isles of the uttermost sea!’ sang a 300-voice choir accompanied by an orchestra made up of fifty of the finest musicians that could be recruited in New Zealand and Australia, along with the Woolston Brass Band.
Wide and wider fling the gate,
Who will aid may enter.
Teacher, artist, man of state,
Artisan, inventor.
Here a sturdy people heeds
Social laws and labour’s needs.
It won a standing ovation, and for five months, from November to April, the elation continued. Thousands made the journey to Christchurch, from around the country and from Australia, after a four-day journey across the Tasman. They came to view the marvels of Empire. The Canadian court, where wilderness had been tamed and turned to profit. The Fijian firewalkers. An axeman’s carnival. An exhibition of British art. And a sea lion that found itself, somewhat disconcerted no doubt, splashing about in Victoria Lake.
The organisers look pleased in the official photographs. All those rows of men in their many and varied committees, with that fine Edwardian embonpoint, tubby tummies under waistcoats strung with the chains of fob watches, their woollen trousers looking rumpled and a bit scratchy, their hats set plumb over beards and moustaches. The struggle for women’s franchise had taken shape in this city, led by the fiercely determined Kate Sheppard. For over seven years she and a committee of dedicated women had overseen the gathering of a nationwide petition of 31,872 signatures, so large it had to be taken into Parliament on a wheelbarrow, where it was unrolled the length of the floor of the debating chamber. The vote was granted in 1893 to both European and Maori: a first, a notable moment when the country ‘instructed the older countries of the world’. Despite their recently acquired voting rights, only four women appear in the photographs, seated beneath enormous hats as members of the Home Industries Committee.
It had all gone so well. It had demonstrated, as Seddon had hoped, the thorough good sense of a decade of Liberal policies that had seen ‘the State furthering development … assisted by the people’. The British representative at the opening, Sir John Gorst, endorsed this approach. The ‘greatest nations of antiquity,’ he said, ‘had been agricultural cultures and comparatively small countries.’ Egypt, for example had produced its greatest art in its early days when its people were peaceful and pastoral. Later, when it became a great conqueror, its internal culture declined. Greece, too, had been at its noblest when young, with no pretensions to power. Like these predecessors, New Zealand, by focusing its energies on raising a ‘healthy race of boys and girls’ with the ambition of creating ‘the healthiest and most intelligent population’, was set upon the right path.
At the end of the summer, the demonstration disappeared. The snowy palace lasted its allotted time, then vanished.
EIGHT YEARS LATER, THOSE HEALTHY boys were off to war, once more to the accompaniment of one of Johannes Andersen’s poetic efforts.
Rose then the mother, the mother of the wandered ones,
Girdled with young nations, circled by the sun.
She hearkened to the crying of the homeless and the dying
With sword opposed defying the Prussian-hearted Hun!
That poem appeared in The Countess of Liverpool’s Gift Book, an anthology of verse and prose endorsed by the wife of New Zealand’s first governor-general, Annette Louise Foljambe. She produced a couple of books during the war. One was a book of knitting patterns for balaclavas, socks and ‘typhus belts’, strips of woollen cloth like a scarf that could be wound around the torso to ward off disease.
For the Empire and for Freedom
We all must do our bit
read the jingle on the cover.
The men go forth to battle.
The women wait — and knit.
The gift book was published in Christchurch in late 1915 to raise funds for wounded soldiers. In that whole sticky banquet of sentiment and jingoism, Andersen’s work is among the stickiest, notable for its rabid patriotism and peculiar Longfellow tub thump.
The hectoring was necessary if men were to be persuaded to enlist, for by mid-1915, the number of men volunteering was not matching the number of men wounded and killed overseas. In August of that year, the dominant Liberal and Reform parties combined to form a new entity, the National coalition government — later, in 1936, to be called the National Party. Among its first acts was the compilation of a register of all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty. The government denied that this was a prelude to conscription, but a few months later, in 1916, the machinery was in place: the ballot box with its little rolling marbles that meant service overseas. Of 187,593 men eligible for conscription for military service, 77,811 stated that they did not wish to fight. Their reasons were listed by Harry Holland, who had been one of four MPs representing another new political entity, the Labour Party, who had argued fiercely against conscription and been jailed for sedition as a result. In Armageddon or Calvary, a book published in 1920, Holland listed four kinds of objector:
One was ‘the Christian objector’ who based his refusal on the Biblical injunction, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The second was ‘the Socialist objector’ and there were thousands of these, for Métin’s New Zealand workers were no longer indifferent to the plight of workers worldwide, but deeply persuaded of the solidarity and brotherhood of
man, and that ‘the interests of the workers of all nations are identical’. Third were the Irish objectors, like the five Cody brothers, who refused to fight while Ireland was not free. And fourth were the Maori objectors, mostly Tainui from the Waikato, who refused to go to war for an imperial power that had confiscated their lands.
Those whose appeals were dismissed were summarily dispatched to join the 30,000 men who were eventually conscripted. Those men whose appeals were upheld were subject to fierce military discipline of the kind described so graphically by Archibald Baxter and echoed by his son, the poet James K. Baxter, when he visualised his father ‘hung / From a torture post at Mud Farm / Because he would not kill’.
Empires are not benevolent forces. They can demand a savage price of their subjects.
NEEDLESS TO SAY, I LEARNED little of all this when I was a child. I was born in 1947, in the year that the Statute of Westminster was ratified, which finally gave my country full autonomy and a new status. It was now a ‘realm’, which sounded noble and Shakespearean in an era when the empire of which it had formed a part was becoming that egalitarian post-war thing, a commonwealth, the very name redolent with Puritan austerity.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 23
