by Peter Wells
In the very early 1840s, when Māori were much the stronger and larger group, Pākehā had to rely on and interact with Māori. Many of the very early migrants learnt te reo Māori simply as a survival tactic, much as new migrants now strive to speak English as quickly as possible. Perhaps the fact my ancestors came with an army meant they were part of a more self-sufficient entity, complete to itself, isolated within its own organism. There was something tightly packed about their early existence in Napier, living virtually in the same residential clustering for a century.
After the trauma of the land wars and the ensuing illegal confiscations, Māori by and large withdrew to live rurally. Geography placed us far apart, especially if we were townspeople as the Northe family essentially remained. Cities became, more or less, ‘white spaces’ right up to the early 1960s. The invisible gates were there and you did not walk past them — or you did so at your peril.
My brother Russell embraced the Māori world when he was a solicitor for the Maori Affairs Department in the 1980s. He learnt te reo and was an advocate for change, working closely with Treaty organisations. He was present and did work at a key hui at Waitangi in 1985 when the Treaty moved from the periphery to become the core document of Aotearoa New Zealand. He also worked with Māori in the Far North: with Tom (Tamihana) Parore, manager of Tai Tokerau Māori Affairs, for example, to end the discharge of sewage into the sea at Opononi. When Russell unobtrusively asked permission to replace a damaged plaque at Tom’s marae, Te Houhanga in Dargaville, ‘this he arranged without any fuss or ceremony but certainly as we saw it, with love and respect for the marae and we as the whanau belonging to the marae’.2 This confluence points to a different energy. At the same time you could say Russell’s progress through life was assisted by white privilege. Yet there are plenty of white people with very little privilege. Nancy Eisenberg’s History of White Trash looks at a persistent class of humans regarded as ‘waste’ — the poorest white people whose ‘whiteness’ is not enough to save them from a life of unemployment, illness, imprisonment and addiction. Race alone, or cultural privilege, do not foretell destiny.
Take the two Northe brothers: John Northe, who spent his entire life working hard within the British Army, still working when he was sixty-eight; and Samuel, whose fate as a convict expressed the extremes of white powerlessness. He became a statistic, enduring a living sentence of non-being — ‘for the term of his natural life’. Both men started life as ‘sacrificial beings’ in an industrial wasteland, yet one harnessed the small business practices inherent in being a Cornish miner, while the other took a short cut, broke into a house and ended up with a commuted death sentence.
My great-grandfather Robert Northe’s career as a successful coal and wood merchant and contractor seems to imply the genes jumped a generation and that all those skills honed in Cornwall were reactivated in him; he worked in an extractive industry, he was a contractor. Yet his older brother William Henry, attempting the same trick, went bankrupt. Human variation plays its part, even in a life underpinned by white privilege.
IF ANYTHING, MY TALE POINTS to the role of another force in New Zealand society, and one nearly always overshadowed by race: class. You could say the family slowly transformed itself over a century and a half, but once again human variation enters the picture. One branch of the Northe family accelerated, while other parts of the family were relaxed and happy to stay where they were.
The name Renouf occurs several times in this book, notably in the ‘To Whom It May Concern’ chapter, when Mr A. P. Renouf, JP writes a reference for Bessie in 1936. ‘Mrs Renouf’ also features pejoratively in Jessie Northe’s letter in ‘How To Write a Letter’, condemned as a chatterer over the bridge table in 1958. (Mrs Renouf was also a ‘Balquhidder Belle’.) In 1871, however, sixty years earlier, Josiah Northe, the youngest son of Sergeant John Northe, was fortunate enough to get an apprenticeship with ‘the first rate Master Builder by the name of Renouf’. The gap seemed wide. But by 1933 the Renoufs and the Northes (or at least my grandparents Ern and Jessie) were social equals. The women played bridge together, in evening gowns. The men played snooker and crewed on the same yacht.
A parallel change in circumstance can be plotted with the rise and fall of James Rochfort, the engineer who features so fearsomely in the 1870s in ‘What’s in a Name?’ In the 1920s, Bessie could remember peeping in a door and seeing him when she was a child. He had shrunk to a tiny little mannikin lying in a bed. Bessie lived just down the lane from Rochfort. (Ern and Jessie’s house was built on a subdivision of the Rochforts’ carriage drive, which was sold in 1910 to become Lawrence Road.) Mr Rochfort’s second wife, impoverished by the Great Depression, would knock on the door of my grandparents’ house, seeking to sell off furniture and paintings in an attempt to keep afloat. Rochfort had ended up marrying his housekeeper. Times change and people’s positions in relation to one another change, too.
I could never work out whether my grandmother’s obsession with social class was actually a personal tic, like colour blindness or a liking for treacle: was she a snob in a way that the landed wealthy classes themselves were not? It was possible. Perhaps her snobbery was an expression of the ambiguity of her position — a child of upper servants, she married a coal merchant, as my grandfather wrote on his wedding certificate, much to my grandmother’s chagrin. (He should have written ‘wood merchant’; so much cleaner and more respectable.) Or was it that she was a naturally intelligent woman, of striking looks and energy, who felt misplaced in the position to which a provincial — and colonial — society had confined her? Possibly. Class works in many ways, oppressive as well as aspirational.
Snobbery today seems the most outdated of feelings. Or perhaps we should be a bit more specific here. Snobbery about social class is démodé but really snobbery has just transferred itself to other things — to food origins, the latest technological breakthrough, youth itself. Snobbery will always exist; it is a human impulse to want to demarcate, emulate, admire — and scorn.
Besides, white privilege had its hidden costs. John James Northey’s son Samuel — named after his convict great-uncle and cousin of Sidney who had gone to South Africa — went off to the First World War. He was a chemist and he joined an ambulance company. But once overseas, following the macho family tradition, he transferred to the field. He was wounded, sent to a hospital in Egypt, patched up and packed off to Gallipoli. He fought at Chunuk Bair with the Wellington Infantry, which was reduced in one action from 805 men to eighty survivors. He was not among them. His mother, Jane, who had watched her husband die from arsenic poisoning had now lost her son. Sergeant John Northe lost two grandsons in the First World War.
Yet history also twines around us and pulls us forward. My mother’s eldest sister, Jean, became a pharmacist in the 1930s. Was this the long arm of the past reaching into the present and pulling her into the future? Her father’s admiration for Samuel, his chemist cousin, can only have been an encouragement for Jean in her choice of a profession, just as her training with the Red Cross allowed her on the day of the quake to stop and help people in the street, bandaging broken limbs, staunching blood, while my grandfather, having different priorities — taking on the survival of the family tribe — went off in search of food. Any family is an intricate mosaic of coincidences, connections, disconnections, random sallies forth into the unknown — and duplications. Yet all in all it makes for a story.
James Baldwin said of Americans that they are ‘an incoherent people in an incoherent country’, and I believe Pākehā suffer from the same incoherence; we refuse to look back at our own history and try to make sense of it.3 Shame over illegal land confiscation and fraudulent dealings makes us want to look away. But this isn’t the complete story. In one way it is a distortion. The findings of the Waitangi Tribunal have enriched, deepened, and in many cases completely changed our understanding of what our history is. I am not arguing in any way that these findings are not accurate and just. But we are foreseeably nearing a pe
riod in which financial compensation and the return of lands are concluded. A different psychological landscape becomes possible, one with a broader view.
What I am calling for is a widening of the lens to look at the complete picture of our history. Since Pākehā have been disrobed of the noble toga of ‘pioneer’, ‘settler’ and ‘colonist’, we have been left singularly naked, stripped of all dignity let alone identity. We are the silhouette without a face, demoted into non-beings — we are simply ‘non Māori’. Yet the truth is Aotearoa New Zealand was fundamentally created, for better or for worse, by the interrelationship between Māori and Pākehā over two hundred years of contact. The understandings and misunderstandings of being together have made us who we are — tangata whenua and tangata tiriti. And even with the great faults that are endemic to our unequal system, we can still look around the world and think that what we have arrived at, imperfect as it is, is not such an entirely wretched outcome. The whole point of the Treaty settlement process was to bring us closer together, in forgiveness, acceptance and regret — and my hope is that in future a telling of stories will be wider, and more empathetic to the early European migrants who arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, and to the journeys that brought them here. The reality is that most Māori have some Pākehā whānau, Pākehā genes: we are here whether we are wanted or not. One might as well be courteous to genealogical interconnectedness and explore the difference in journeys. It may just help us understand one another.
‘Nations are built on wishful versions of their origins,’ says Hilary Mantel, ‘stories in which our forefathers were giants of one kind of another. This is how we live in the world: romancing.’4 With this book I have made my Pākehā family and ancestors into stories, subjects of a romance in its traditional meaning (lives of love and death). Some stories may be true, some may be my own misunderstanding of stories, but it is an attempt at telling a story about being Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand through time.
‘Complexity is our only safety,’ said Baldwin, a homosexual Afro-American novelist who knew what he was talking about, ‘and love is the only key to our maturity.’5 What I am calling for, in a way, is some more romance, some more imaginative storytelling about the Pākehā past — an understanding of its emotional complexity — and maybe even more, for Pākehā, and Māori, to feel a little aroha.
Notes
1 James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, New Yorker, 17 November 1962, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind (accessed 31 August 2017).
2 Letter sent to me in fax form, 24 September 1999, from Tom (Tamihana) Parore, QSO, manager of Tai Tokerau Māori Affairs. Ten years after Russell’s death I organised a dinner to celebrate his life. Tom and his wife, Eileen, attended, and Tom spoke of his admiration for Russell as ‘kind, considerate, immensely able and dedicated to improving the status of Maori as well as other New Zealanders’. He described Russell as ‘a legend that will never be forgotten’. The accompanying photo shows the plaque which Russell organised for Te Houhanga marae. Almost symbolically, Russell, who would die a few years later, is missing from the photograph.
3 Ed Pavlic, ‘Come On Up, Sweetheart, James Baldwin’s Letters to His Brother’, http://kalamu.com/neogriot/2017/08/16/history-james-baldwins-letters-to-his-brother/ (accessed 31 August 2017). In this essay, which first appeared in the Boston Review, Pavlic quotes Baldwin saying that beneath white America’s ‘conqueror image’ lie ‘a great many unadmitted despairs and confusions, and anguish and unadmitted crimes and failures’.
4 Hilary Mantel, ‘Why I Became a Historical Novelist’, Reith Lecture, The Guardian, 3 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist (accessed 21 July 2017).
5 Pavlic, ‘Come On Up, Sweetheart’. The quotation used in this essay is actually from Baldwin’s last published essay, ‘To Crush the Serpent’ (1987). The final line is ‘And love is where you find it.’
Acknowledgements
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the Michael King Writers Centre, which is supported by Creative New Zealand, for a summer residency in 2014 where I developed this project. I would also like to thank the family members who helped me by providing information, photographs, family stories and support. These include Lawrence Northe, who gathered together family photographs at a time when they lay scattered among many different branches of the family; Barrington Northe, who has the biggest collection of Northe family memorabilia; and Val Swailes, who kept tabs on an enormous amount of genealogical information and was always generous in her sharing of knowledge. I am especially grateful to Val’s father, Percy Northe, who wrote the initial family tree in the 1950s and established lines of descent and gathered up a few crucial letters.
My cousin Suzanne Blumhardt supplied useful contextual information and memories of a grandfather I never met. Pete Bullivant was very kind in allowing me to use the remarkable photographs his uncle took on the day of the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, immediately after impact. The archives at MTG Hawke’s Bay provided a nest for information, and Gail Pope, at that time the archivist, often pointed me in the direction of information relating to the Northes.
I am a Northe by descent through my mother, and carry the surname as my middle name, but I have to thank the wider Northe family for allowing me to delve among the mysteries and sometimes tragedies of the wider family. All the views in the book are of course my own.
This book had a long gestation, and was carried along by my mother’s life and then death, but was eased by the constant companionship, empathy and love of my partner, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins. Jane Parkin as editor was a pleasure to work with.
‘The past is prologue’, as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, and it is my hope that this glance back sends some glints and gleams into the future.
About the Author
PETER WELLS IS A WRITER of fiction and non-fiction, and a writer/director in film. His fiction looks at a world of secrets, identity, subterfuge and illusion, frequently using the lens of a gay narrator. His first book, Dangerous Desires, won the Reed Fiction Award, the NZ Book Award, and PEN Best New Book in Prose in 1992. His memoir Long Loop Home won the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography, and he has won many awards for his work as a film director. He is co-founder of the Auckland Writers Festival. In 2006, Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and film. His most recent histories examined William Colenso, a resident of Napier, and Kereopa Te Rau, the Pai Mārire follower who was hanged in Napier for murdering Reverend Carl Völkner. Dear Oliver brings to an end this Napier trilogy.
Northe family tree
Copyright
First published in 2018 by Massey University Press
Private Bag 102904, North Shore Mail Centre
Auckland 0745, New Zealand
www.masseypress.ac.nz
Text copyright © Peter Wells, 2018
Images copyright © as credited page 321
Cover image: Peter Wells, his mother Bess and grandmother Jessie at Auckland Airport in the late 1960s. Back cover image: A letter from Richard Mercer to Jessie Northe, written in the 1890s.
Design by Kate Barraclough
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright Act 1994, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner(s) and the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand
ISBN: 978-0-9941473-6-3
eISBN: 978-0-9941473-7-0
The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher
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