by A. N. Wilson
—Mum had intended to stay in England for the summer, but she stayed for good! And about a year later I arrived on the scene!
—She bucked the trend. Normally, it is the Huia men who go abroad. Meet an American or an English woman, and stay; whereas Huia women have a homing instinct. So it has now been shown. Hence the Man Drought.
—The Man Drought?
Her question came out as a schoolgirl hoot.
—What on EARTH?
—Surely you knew? The proportion of women to men on the Island is something like sixty to forty. And the gap is widening, among the graduate classes, aged between twenty and fifty.
—What accounts for that, I wonder?
—Some people think it explains our having so many lesbians.
—I hadn’t noticed.
I liked that reply. I even more liked the suddenly peremptory tone in which she said it. It’s not a word you’ll be reading much in this book. I don’t know about you, I’m against labels, and find it really bizarre that people want to be categorized as black, white, LGBTQI, etc., rather than being individuals. She did not let him expand on his generalization, but plunged on with the autobiography.
—Anyhow, Mum brought me back three times when I was a child, and we always used to come to the Gallery. I know we aren’t supposed to believe in colonies any more – well, of course we don’t believe in them – but it does not stop me having a soft spot for this sort of thing. And it is such a lovely pair of pictures. Dear old Gilbert Rhys!
A whoop of schoolgirlish mirth. The Madcap of the Remove.
They were standing in front of Gilbert Rhys’s The Death of George Pattison.
Since it no longer exists – it was pulverized by the Quake, and was in any case lucky to still be hanging on the walls of a public gallery, given its content – I’ll describe it for you, in case you never saw it.
It was one of his most famous landscapes – famous on the Island, that is. It evokes with great love the wooded hillsides which still rise majestically above the western suburban shores of our city. Perhaps it was the sheer topographic accuracy of it which allowed its survival, in spite of the fact that no historians believe in the scene depicted. It was said that Obadiah Fairbrother – the lawyer whose family had grown so rich through wool – attended the death-bed of the greatest Tangata chieftain, Tamihana Huli, from whom he had leased vast tracts of fertile land. ‘George Pattison’ was the name adopted by this proud tribal chief after he had not merely formed land agreements with the Europeans, but had also been baptized as a member of the Church of England.
Fairbrother allowed it to be known that ‘George Pattison’, in his dying breath, had not simply given his land to the Europeans, but that he had done so in perpetuity. He is supposed to have gasped out, ‘Remain here after I am gone – ake, ake, ake – forever’. Even the most fervent admirers of the Victorians take this story with a pinch of salt.
After the signing of the Treaty in the 1840s, the growth of population following the gold rush, the development of Waikuku Harbour into an industrial port, it was almost inevitable that our colonial forebears should wish to build a city. They climbed over the ridge beyond the site of present-day Pakenham Street to the vast plain which sits behind the harbour. Here, for five hundred years and more, the Tangata had pursued their watery lives, paddling in the wetlands, fishing, and gathering reeds which they used for clothing and artefacts.
When they became aware that the Malahi intended to build their city on the wetlands, the local Tangata chieftain and his advisers had requested a meeting with Fairbrother and the other European worthies who were drawing up plans, arranging loans from European banks, and commissioning English architects to build streets, squares, warehouses, the Guildhall, the Garrick Theatre, the Liddell Library and the churches.
The wetlands, which had been part of the domains of the great ‘George Pattison’, were an entirely unsuitable place on which to build a pastiche European city. The chieftain’s sons told Fairbrother and his companions that it was crazy even to contemplate such a building-scheme. Fairbrother took this as an attempt by the younger Malahi to subvert the Treaty of HuruHuru. Historians now tend to the belief that, though there was an element of resentment in the Tangata, they were, for the most part, trying to give the newcomers some very necessary warnings. These had been wetlands time out of mind. They were not suitable for building edifices of brick and stone. It would not be possible to lay deep foundations in such a terrain. And besides, there was the possibility of earthquake.
When Fairbrother dismissed the younger Tangata’s attempts to warn him, they asked for another meeting, bringing with them one of their elder statesmen, the formidable Gee-wara-go. The old chieftain, a Merlin-like figure with an abundant white beard falling from his cheeks, had tried to warn the Europeans by reference to an old folktale which the Tangata people told themselves. The Earth Mother Siyuta was pregnant with her difficult son Mudu. He was still in her womb, but he was kicking and raging to be let out. Every now and again, when this obstreperous foetus kicked the sides of his mother’s womb, there was a tremor in the earth. There had been tremors in the wetlands. Many Tangata carried the memories of these moments, when their little skiffs suddenly found themselves overturned by disturbances beneath the waters, or when apparently dry meadowlands suddenly swelled with mud which came from beneath the surface of the earth.
Obadiah Fairbrother, emerging from a conversation with the chieftain on this subject, wrote home that it
almost beggared belief that the savages, in their avaricious desire to hold on to this land – rightfully ours since the Treaty – should attempt to invoke the authority of their heathen gods to dissuade us from bringing civilization to this territory. I thank the one true God that we shall be able, in spite of their superstitious attempts to frustrate our endeavour, to build a British city in which every mountain shall be laid low, and every valley shall indeed be exalted.
They had moved on to the painting beside it.
—I like this even more, she said. The arrival of the First Tangata Settlers.
—It reminds me of the watercolour illustrations to my Bible when I was a kid, said Mr Dombey.
—Harold Copping, was her reply.
—That’s right!
How weird is the madness of love! Her casual naming of a watercolourist was greeted with an enthusiasm which could not have been more excited if she had just offered something improper.
—One would once have called it exotic, she said, but probably even the word exotic is pejorative now.
—I’m not sure. I’m one eighth Tangata. I’ll allow you to call us exotic.
—You’re right, the men on the canoes are comparable to the figures of Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage as she found the infant Moses among the bullrushes.
—Painted about the time Lord Cromer was lording it over the real Egyptians.
In both cases, the ‘exotic’ ‘natives’ could have been ‘extras’ in a contemporary production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, perhaps directed by Harley Granville-Barker. Over their heads, skimpily clad handmaids waved ostrich feathers, and their male companions wore greaves, cuirasses, golden buckles, and kilts which resembled stage costumes. As the pair spoke, so eagerly, I sensed she did not really fancy him as much as he fancied her. On the other hand, she would not have agreed to come for this little tryst if she had not fancied him a bit or at the very least felt flattered by his worship. She was teasing him, perhaps teasing herself? I sensed her holding back, while he was evidently ready to gallop forward into whatever madness his passions led him.
—Eleanor, he said, I’ve SO enjoyed this!
—Well, it was fun . . .
—Can we . . . can we make it a regular . . . thing?
No, evidently, she did not want a ‘thing’, or not what he called a ‘thing’, for she looked away and smiled, flattered but troubled.
—I think we’ve both got jobs to go to, she said.
As they turned, they
both saw me. Her creamy pale cheeks flushed scarlet, and then, with her perfect garden-party manners, she said, ‘Hel-LO!’ as though I was the person she had most wanted to see in the world. He merely nodded at me, as they walked out of the room together. They were not hand in hand, but I did wonder, had I not been there, whether they might have been. Well, well. The Dean of our Cathedral, Eleanor Bartlett, and Charlie Nicolson, one of the highest-powered lawyers in Aberdeen, both seemingly on the verge of a bit of midsummer madness. But presumably, even the clergy, and even senior lawyers, can fall in love.
Like I say, those two period piece paintings by Gilbert Rhys, and, indeed, the whole of the dear old Dyce, with its big stone staircase and its portraits of King George V and Queen Mary on the landing, and its air of not having changed all that much since that pair had stirred the loyal feelings of many a Huia sheep-farmer to send out their sons (at their own expense) to be slaughtered in France and Flanders; the Dyce with its Gibson statue of Venus in the cafeteria, where old ladies drank coffee next to giant rampaging cheese-plants, has all been blown off the face of the earth. And here we are in the ruins of Aberdeen. And, yes, ‘We’ve got to live,’ as the Lady said, ‘no matter how many skies have fallen.’ (Or rather, as the man said, before he told us that racy story about the Lady.) With us, it’s not just the skies that fall, it’s the land that rocks. Who knows what lies ahead?
We’re, like, post, here on the Island; very post, us; post just about everything, except post-truth. That’s not the Huia way, and it’s certainly not mine. This book is my journey into Truth – because it is a Journey into Love, which we – my Love and I – believe to be the same thing. But we are very definitely post-much else: post-Earthquake, that is. Postcolonial. Certainly. In many ways, until the Quake, we were carrying on like the post-war generations. But now all that’s behind us, and some of us, well, we’re posthumous some of us. Postcards, pretty tourist postcards sent from addresses that have been blown sky high, views of beauty spots that will never be spotted again, that are post-spots. Postal votes in an election for a local Parliament which is just a heap of bricks and concrete. Post-it notes stuck to dead computer screens in roofless office blocks. Posts in the shifting sands, post-hoc; postscripts in history; post-traumatic stressed. Postmen and postwomen with no mail to deliver, no doors to put it through if we had it in our postsack. Post men, too. Is that what we are, my Love, you and I? Not so much that annoying L word, which, like I say, I’m not planning on using in this book . . . but – well, Post Men?
We can’t climb out of our post-seismic, post-structuralist language games. Metaphor is our only home now our material homes have all been demolished by God. (Is He or She a metaphor, by the way?) We only speak scornfully of metaphors as ‘obvious’ because they are true. (My beloved’s dad apparently liked to say, ‘Only second rate minds despise the obvious.’)
Now – it really is true, we can’t trust the ground we tread on.
The tectonic plates which, in their violent convulsions, created our mountain ranges and our green tufty hills are on the move again. They really are on the move, shaking up our idyllic sheep farms; our quaintly retro, smugly happy, Victorian parks really moved. They changed us forever. No wonder we clunk from one metaphor to the next, post-structuralists all. The Kantian hope of being able to describe a thing-in-itself is put on hold. Religion itself can never be quite the same . . . Can it, Nellie? Are we all post-Christians now?
Digby would maybe once have snorted at such language, Digby the single-minded atheist. She preferred to think of herself as pre-Christian, a Euripidean sceptic, or a Stoic of the Senecan breed. But witness the journey of our Dean, Eleanor Bartlett.
It needed no earthquake, of course, to draw forth a stream of clichés from Rex Tone, our go-ahead mayor; their unstoppable lava-flow spouted when he first stood for membership of the Council – no, probably much earlier when he was a student politician at Carmichael University, reading Business Studies.
Rex’s emptier sayings got picked up and mocked by Cavan Cliffe, legendary radio voice and host of Island Breakfast for quarter of a century, but even she could not escape the metaphor-trap.
Skilled oarswoman she may be, but she found her little skiff adrift in the shallows, her oars clogged with reeds, as she tried to describe the Quake to her listeners, or as she interviewed so many of them afterwards, shellshocked, walking wounded, somnambulists, air-raid victims looking for their old lives in the rubble, mix and match your metaphors, they were the only instruments she had, to build pictures for us as we rummaged in the debris for fragments of our old certainties.
Even Cavan, who had built her career on cynicism about the half-truths and false hopes peddled by salespeople, politicians (same thing), charlatans, saw us all needing to find something we’d lost in the ruins. We needed to rebuild our Convention Centre, Rex Tone’s pride and joy, our sports stadium, our concert hall, our schools. We needed to find among the wrecked concrete slabs, the spaghetti of twisted cables, the gaping holes in the highways, the buckled tramlines that stood upright like inebriated lamp-posts in the poststreets, that old something which had led our ancestors to settle here in the first place. We needed their optimism, their sense of a future. You’d expect an earthquake to obliterate evidences of the past. What none of us predicted was the way it obliterated our capacity to imagine a future.
The Dean, Eleanor Bartlett, said that here we have no abiding city, and maybe that’s about all we can say. Our Island had once been home, and it no longer is. None of us feels at home here, not even the Tangata. Maybe none of us is MEANT to be here. Meant by Nature or the gods. Historically, the Island did not even have mammals on it, never mind human beings, until the thirteenth century. So of course we quite literally aren’t at home here.
After all, although they called it – seemingly from their first arrival, depicted by Gilbert Rhys – the Homeland, or Whenua, they are immigrants, just as we are, those Indonesian tribespeople who sailed here in cane, masted rafts or paddled in their gigantic canoes to these shores, at about the time, from another region of the planet, that Dante Alighieri was journeying through the infernal, purgatorial and paradisal realms. The early settlers – known now collectively as the Tangata, though they actually came from a variety of Indonesian tribes and families – were, as far as archaeology is able to shed light upon the matter, the first human beings to set foot upon our Island. The Tangata fought many tribal wars with one another before we – the Malahi – arrived. Dutchmen in the seventeenth century were the first Malahi to come, discovering our shores almost by chance, as they made their way to the Indies in pursuit of trade. A century later came the famous English sea captain and his naturalist companion. Later, of course, the waves of Scottish and English soon came to outnumber the Tangata – hugely. By the time they erected the bronze statue of the Imperial Mother in Argyle Square, at whose plinth Penny Whistle busks daily, there were ten Malahi to every one Tangata. There was much interbreeding, of course, so that today the proportions are blurred. The seven per cent Tangata realize that, of the ninety-three per cent Malahi, very many have Tangata great-grandparents. Over the years, there have been many disputes between us, the Malahi and the Tangata, about the rights and wrongs of land-ownership, and about the evils of colonialization. But all of us carry a guilty sense that the arrival of any human beings at all, in such a paradise as ours, was a kind of intrusion, a pollution.
No hominid feet, no primitive ancestor of the human form, ever trod our thickly wooded hillsides. No hairy, hunched figure, on its way to becoming a human being, ever tried to spear or cudgel the multifarious fish in our wetlands. There were no troglodytes in the caves at the foot of our great Southern Alps, whose snow-capped beauty came into being when, millions of years ago, tectonic shifts took place, equal in majesty to those which tower over Switzerland and Italy. Indeed, there were not even any mammals, until the Tangata brought them on their rafts. There were only fish, and birds and insects and reptiles. They buzzed and twittered and
trilled about in the pure air of the forests with no marmoset or koala or dog or human eyes to appreciate or to threaten them.
It was the early Tangata who brought dogs to help them hunt. Intentionally or not, they also appear to have brought rats. The Royal Naval vessels of the eighteenth century certainly disgorged ships’ rats. Innocent of any of the modern sense of ecology, these bluff folk also gave to the Tangata pigs and sheep. By the close of the nineteenth century, our Island was famous for its sheep-farmers. Little by little the birdlife diminished. Within a few centuries of the human arrivals, there were about half the number of birds. The songs from the brake which had so delighted the visitors of the eighteenth century were stilled.
All of us, then, Tangata and Malahi, bear within us, like some felt folk memory of pollution, a sense that to arrive here was to spoil it. Science in our own day, with its keen sense of ecological balance, told us a Fall Myth which we already carried within our imaginations. The very emblem of our Island, the Huia – our nickname for one another – is an extinct bird, though it wasn’t extinct when it was chosen as a national emblem on the first Victorian coins minted in Carmichael. Visitors to our National Museum there will see fine examples of Huia feathers in the cloaks of the Tangata tribesmen. There were also similar examples in the museum here in Aberdeen, though they, among so much else, were destroyed in the Earthquake. When the Dean of our Cathedral was first brought to Aberdeen as a child by her parents, she remembered being shown the feather cloaks by her father, the canon. He pointed out to her that there were two fine specimens of just such Huia cloaks in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
When the Victorian anthropologists and collectors had bestowed these intricate examples of tribal workmanship on the various museums, there were still actual Huias – the birds that is, not human beings – trilling their melodious songs from the branches of the eucalyptus trees. Their dazzling plumage, however, was no less tempting to Edwardian milliners than it had been to the Tangata tribespeople of old. Both in our Island, and back home in the Old Country, distinguished and titled ladies swept into luncheons, their necks trimmed with mink, their hats resplendent with Huia feathers. Queen Alexandra was especially fond of them, and there is a charming photograph of her standing beside Sir Dighton Probyn, a Huia boa round her neck which probably required the feathers of two hundred birds to supply.
