by Peter Wells
The Napier Barracks was made of battens of stout wood and uprights — the same practical, unbeautiful design as the prison. It was surrounded by an eight-foot barricade of rammed earth. For a while the officers lived nearby in houses made of raupō, while the ordinary ranks like John Northe, his wife and family of nine suffered under tents cut into the wedge of the hill itself, in the Onepoto Gully. It was provisional and basic. It looked like it could all vanish in a blink.
Down at the port, on the eastern side of the hill, was a wharf and, in time, pubs and brothels and a slaughter house. The port was the reason for the town’s existence, and became a key stopping-off point between Auckland, the old capital, and Wellington, the new capital, commonly called the Empire City or, more derogatively, the Dusty City. It processed onto ships whatever the surrounding landscape could export: flax, wool, whale oil. It also took in everything the province needed: top hats, stoves, glacé leather high-heeled shoes, corrugated iron, books, valerian, cases of whiskey. And gradually a town grew up on diametrically the other side of ‘Scinde Island’ — basically on the only piece of flat land there was. (Domett’s private view of Napier was that it was ‘a hopeless spot for a town site … a precipitous island of barren, uninhabited ridges covered with fern and rough grass dissected by gorges and ravines, with a narrow strip of shingle skirting the cliffs, and joined by the mainland south by a five mile shingle bank’.)5 Napier’s streets were gradually filled with tiny wooden cottages; shops appeared, a theatre, a photography studio. Hotels proliferated, and altogether ‘the beautiful plan’ on paper started to have a dynamism all its own. What started out as a dream had by the 1870s become a reality.
IN 1871 NAPIER HAD A population of 2179, an increase of 352 since the census of 1867. (Some 165 births were registered in the calendar year 1870 alone.) There was an almost equal number of males (1164) and females (1015). To give some sense of scale, Wellington’s population at the same time was 7890.
This increase overall was quite some accomplishment, since the years between 1867 and 1871 had been a harrowing period of war, insecurity and financial depression. When the East Cape was ravaged by the prophet-warrior Te Kooti Arikirangi, Napier was vulnerable. There were fears it would be sacked and burnt to the ground, its Pākehā population slaughtered. Ngāti Kahungunu, for reasons of self-interest as much as anything (they leased land to many settlers), provided a protective shell around the small, isolated settlement. The sense of paranoia faded.
Then in 1871 the price of wool began to rise with the beautiful ease of a dream, so Napier’s wealth increased. By the end of 1871, for example, Napier’s banks held one-quarter of the nation’s savings. This financial x-ray gives us a sense of Napier’s position in the hierarchy of towns in New Zealand, although photographs of the period tend to show the place as empty, and as provisional as a tent.
Maybe the sense of overwhelming isolation gave the town a febrility, a hyper-activity which led to the creation of a great many clubs and associations. If Richard Halkett Lord, the London-born editor of Napier’s Daily Telegraph and friend of Charles Dickens, drawled that ‘dullness reigns supreme in Napier’, this was offset by the seemingly agitated tadpole swarm of activities created by energetic individuals who went out of their way to provide diversions.6 The fact is a town with a population of 2716 had an astonishing three newspapers.
The level of alcohol consumption was remarkable, too. Napier, like every colonial outpost of the Empire, was saturated in alcohol. In 1871 three breweries turned out 180 barrels of beer per month, the equivalent of 12 gallons of beer for every man, woman and child in the province. In the same year 10,440 gallons of spirits were imported. You could say people drank for enjoyment, but I feel drinking helped people who were profoundly affected by loss. Every migrant loses his or her country, loses the tang of the air they knew, the individual rhythms of seasons, the comfort of known faces. Every migrant awakes to a new day with a sense of psychic dislocation. For some this would be bearable. But for others, caught in the long-term drudgery of colonial life, there was only alcohol to soften the pain.
The lure of alcohol was a dangerous one for the lost souls of colonial New Zealand — Pākehā and Māori. For the working classes it was especially ruinous. The difference between a man drinking and a man sober was often the difference between a modicum of prosperity or children scavenging for food and resorting to petty crime. Children themselves often started drinking at an early age. For many people, colonial New Zealand was less a mythic land of plenty than a cruel and unsparing universe.
EVERY FEW DAYS I VISIT my mother. Often as I walk into her room Bess raises her face, but I can tell she is not sure who I am. She waits till she hears my voice — at this point she recognises me. I watch the softening of the muscles on her face as she relaxes into a smile. The words we exchange go back to childhood. They could be the calls of birds in a tree. ‘Hello, Pete,’ she’ll say, using the childhood version of my name. ‘Hi there, Mum,’ I’ll say, with my own special lightness of intonation, and then I’ll move forward and brush my lips across her raised face, just by her left cheekbone.
We’ll settle then into a ritual that is as fixed in its way as a pavane. This involves ‘having a cup of tea’. This deploys the archaic use of a teapot, tea leaves, two porcelain cups, a milk jug — and usually a plate for biscuits that come out of a biscuit tin. Occasionally my mother will comment on why, of all the cake tins she possessed, I selected ‘such an old one’ to take into the exile of her retirement village. I do not say that is precisely why I saved it. (It is a wartime cake tin and shows Santa Claus parachuting from a plane into a snowy fantasy English landscape.)
This hints at the nature of our relationship. I am the custodian of the past while my mother is freed from the clammy hold of all the old connections. Why have I kept myself as curator? It imprisons me as much as it defines me. You could say I hold on to all the threads of the past because they offer some comfort.
My mother’s memory, at ninety-eight, has all but gone. That is, she recalls certain things but not necessarily in the right order. One day Bess said to me, ‘What did Russell die of, Pete?’ This was a reference to my elder brother, her only other child. I hesitated a moment before giving in to the gravity of truth.
‘AIDS, Mum.’
‘What?’
‘AIDS. You know. HIV.’
It was almost certainly not the answer she wanted. Or expected.
After less than a minute, she repeated the question.
‘What did Russell die of, Pete?’
I reflected for only a nanosecond on the fact that my brother’s death — now almost a quarter of a century ago — was an event so tragic that my mother lost her reason. It broke her life in two as effectively as when a plate is smashed right down the middle. She had eventually gained wisdom and stature through the act of acceptance — accepting the unacceptable, I suppose you could say. But now it was being winnowed away by the scouring process of memory loss.
I repeated the statement about AIDS, aware that it seemed almost brutal. Once again she appeared to both accept the statement and, simultaneously, subsume it in the endless rollback of memory breaking apart. I was used to this. In some ways it exhausted me. My actions were, I knew, those of a man eternally rolling the Sisyphus wheel up the hill. The fact I was prepared to do this was perhaps a sign of my desperation. There was only my mother left — I had no children, no further family. But we were locked in a symbiotic relationship that I knew would soon enough have an endpoint. The very nearness of this endpoint — a year, two years, five years, eight years — meant I continued on with what some people might see as a pathetic charade.
Yet the reality was we still had a warm, close relationship that was not without its pleasures.
‘Where is Jean?’ she asked me one day. She was referring to her elder sister, who had at times deployed the haughty viewpoint of an older sibling who sees further because they have been alive longer.
‘Aunty Jean died in 198
4, Mum,’ I said, thinking quickly. ‘You were in the hospital with her the night she died. You were sleeping in the same room.’
I filled in details that were important to me, that had been handed over to me, much as important plans of a past military success might be handed over to provide useful intelligence in the future. (How to deal with death. How to behave in an emergency. How to go into the house of death and make yourself at home.)
‘Really?’ she said to me, not entirely convinced.
‘Yes, it’s almost thirty years ago now,’ I said by way of fastening the date into a firm chronology.
‘What year are we now?’
(I had my uses.)
‘2014.’
‘Well, it’s no wonder I haven’t had a letter from her lately,’ Bess said. ‘I was just thinking the other day, a letter from her is definitely overdue.’
I burst out laughing, and she, catching my lilt, laughed too.
In this shared pleasure lay the reason I still dropped in to visit my mother every few days. I did this to check on her, but I did it as much to try to keep her in some sort of chronological sequence. I knew she dreaded losing her studio apartment and being consigned to the hospital wing where you had your own room but were stripped of the last vestiges of independence.
Her doctor had told me in a matter-of-fact way that Bess was suffering dementia. He said it was just luck whether she reacted to her dementia in a violent way, ‘in which case there was a further place that she could be placed’, or whether she accepted it calmly, in which case she could stay in the hospital wing.
This may have been another reason for my frequent visits. It was one of the last services I could do for her. But it was also something more. My mother has always been at the core of my understanding of the past. It was through her that I had entered the archway to the past and walked inside. This had been immensely productive — I had made films and books that were the product of my attempt to understand, synthesise, perhaps even mythologise the stories and the discrepancies within the stories she had told me.
So my visits to her were protective, but they were also a way of touching, almost superstitiously, the blarney stone of the past. I sensed it was all about to vanish. I would be left. And then I would be the repository of all the stories.
There was a further fact. I was now foreseeing my own death in the longer term. And, feeling the hour was late, I had begun to feel impatience with the stale stories of the past. I had come to understand how, if these stories had been a source of creativity, they had also — powerful as myths — confined me and even created distortions in my own personality. They had inhibited me and created aspects of my personality I had come to see as faults. I was almost spontaneously snobbish, or rather the way I saw people reflected some of the anxieties that arose from my mother’s family’s perspective on their origins. I lacked the broad strength of the uninhibited. I had had to fight my way towards understanding my own perspective across what now seemed a battlefield of redundant mores and out-of-date ideals.
I felt a curious mix of impatience, sorrow, regret, anger and a deeper sense that soon it was all going to vanish completely. All I could do to retain it was to fight to the close with the only weapon I possessed — my own intelligence deployed in the form that had become my closest friend and ally. Words.
WHEN I WAS WRESTLING WITH the problem of how to make this book speak to the future, I found myself writing a letter to the newest member of the extended family: a baby whose arrival is a delightful surprise. The letter to him is like a hand reaching into a future I will in time vacate. (That ‘handshake with history’.)
I had a wish to describe a world on the very cusp of vanishing. I wanted to explain — explain a little about what had formed me, which in turn is an explanation of the way this world, or at least my understanding of it, was shaped. With this in mind, I began writing a letter to an eight-month-old child who may or may not ever read it.
Let me explain who this child is. His name is Oliver and he lives in San Francisco, and he came, with his two mothers, to Napier. His grandmother is my cousin. My mother is his great-aunt.
I wanted to explain to him this past which is slipping away — the past of his colonial New Zealand family, and even the life trajectory of someone like me who fought for human rights for gay men and women (as we once called the struggle). How life has changed beyond recognition, while accepting it will change again profoundly in his lifetime. In writing the letter I seemed to find a way of talking — explaining, making sense — that looked at the past but with an eye to how inexplicable it might be to the future.
So in a larger sense this is book about family letters, which neurologist Oliver Sacks correctly described as ‘a corrective against the deceits of memory’.7 It functions as biography and autobiography (and social history), but it also looks and meditates on an uneasy present. Some people say we are living through the Anthropocene Period, when the human impact on the ecosystem is so critical that extinction of the species is possible. Other people describe this as a time of ‘acceleration’, when changes are so fast and transformational that many people struggle to keep up, feel left behind. I am very aware of the fragility of the present. So if this book is about family letters set in a past on the point of vanishing, it is also, in the form of ‘A Letter to Oliver’, my letter to the future.
Notes
1 Object #1015380, Donald McLean MS-Papers-0032-0245 1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
2 Object #1002202, MS-Papers-0032-0245, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
3 Alice Woodhouse, The Naming of Napier (Napier: Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum, 1970), 5.
4 Peter Wells, Journey to a Hanging (Auckland: Vintage, 2014), 165–67.
5 J. B. Annabel, ‘Planning Napier 1850–1968’, PhD thesis, Massey University, 2012, https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/3955/02_whole.pdf (accessed 21 July 2017).
6 Daily Telegraph, 31 March 1871. Halkett wrote: ‘Napier is not usually considered a lively place, even by the few enthusiasts who insist upon regarding Hawke’s Bay through rose-coloured spectacles … But though dullness reigns supreme in Napier, it does occasionally, like Mrs Dombey, “make an effort” and the effort is generally rewarded with success.’
7 Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (London: Picador, 2015), 63.
Dear Oliver
This is a letter to try to explain a world that is receding so fast it will have vanished entirely by the time you are a young man. I myself might even be dead. Certainly you will have trouble working out who I am. Let me explain.
YOUR GRANDMOTHER GERALDINE IS MY cousin. Geraldine and I had the same formidable grandmother. And the Northe family from which we are both descended on our mothers’ side was a formative influence on Geraldine, me, and our other three cousins. You see, our family is small. It’s like a compact family firm, one that appeared for a while to proliferate — my grandfather had seven brothers — then it contracted.
Part of this contraction was that my brother and I were gay. We grew up in a time when gay men and women did not have families. It was biologically impossible. If a gay man or woman wished to have a child they might instead assume a different persona, swallow their real self and pretend to be heterosexual. Then they could have children. And often those children grew up not knowing their father or mother was actually gay. Life is different now — better in many ways — and I am glad of it.
But take it from me, we are related — just.
I am telling you this story because I want to explain to you the New Zealand side of your family. Well, your mother is not New Zealand-born and your grandmother Geraldine, though born in New Zealand, has lived in Canada much longer than she ever lived here in New Zealand (which will probably be called Aotearoa by the time you read this). But Geraldine is very much a New Zealander. Her view of life was formed by her childhood, and by her early life in New Zealand.
Your grandfather Grant — who married Geraldine — was also born
a New Zealander, so that this part of your past — so distant as to appear imaginary to you to whom the real world is everything — yet coursed through the memories of your grandparents, provided them with a moral basis to make decisions about the world. A country forms you whether you are aware of it or not. Its weather, the form of its landscape, the way people murmur, queue, clap, argue. But it’s even more than that. Because on both your grandmother’s and your grandfather’s side of the family you are descended from colonists — people who now stand on the wrong side of history, who have no claim for sympathy or empathy, who stole land from indigenous people, crippled their souls, sold their treasures and most of all supplanted what was native to the landscape with a false identity, all based on the distant land from which these colonists came.
You will believe all this. It is the only story that can be told. Yet there is never one story. Life is made up of many contrasting stories, many of which conflict at certain points. And from these conflicting, raw edges comes a sense of the varied hues of truth. But this is getting too complicated. Let’s simplify things by saying I will try to explain a little what it was like to be born into a colonial family, long after Aotearoa ceased to be a colony: yet this is a fact — a colony can remain inside your head, in the pinpoint of the pupil of your eyes. You could hear it in what your grandmother said without thinking. You observed it in the way things seemed so fixed. Then the world changed all around you to the extent that the past dropped away, fell off the edge of time and vanished to become some form of space junk. But this is getting too complicated also.
